I am a somewhat unremarkable product designer. I'm great at my job, but still just a guy in a chair doing the thing. And I've been using this advice for years. It has made an absolutely mind boggling impact on my life. I recently took a few years off (achievable in part thanks to the OG version of this post), and was worried about returning to the cooled-off job market thanks to all the doomers on here talking about firing hundreds of applications into the empty void. Very little has changed. The market is a bit tighter but still fine. Please do not let the other crabs convince you that the bucket is too greased to be worth clawing at. Patio11 has probably made me 1M+ over my career with his blog post. And it is not because I'm some mega genius. I am merely good enough at my job to be worth wanting on a normal team. If you aren't that, fix that. But 20-50% lift on the majority of offers is super, super, super achievable if you're able to recognize what employers value, and communicate your ability to meet those needs. Seriously. So frustrating to see how many people are here telling others this is BS and not to try. Fuck that. At least *try*.
Telling others how “the market” is when you only have your very limited subjective and anecdotal experience to share is a bit bold, and probably dispiriting to read for others that do not have the same experience. Do you really have a stat sig number of interviews and offer to say that the market merely tightened a bit?
Are all the people here reporting a shift in their ability to get a job in the last year not even good enough to pass the bar in a normal team ?
I share your experience of having had no issue, but we have to recognize that our specific role, history, location, network, sales skills and luck all play a role, and may not be a general rule.
> Telling others how “the market” is when you only have your very limited subjective and anecdotal experience to share is a bit bold
Aren't people that complain about this not being possible not doing exactly the same? Maybe we can land on: This is a comment section. People bring their own views of things.
The anchor here is Patricks ideas. I am not sure if his data raises to the level of statistical significance, but it's clearly not nothing and, unless he is outright lying, seems to yield significant positive results.
What people in this thread offer on the other end is fairly light, ignores a lot of Patricks advice, tries to make special cases where there are none, and is really a lot of regular grade negativity and excuses – and then claiming that the advice does not work, when, what they really mean is: I really do not want any advice, because I am a grown up person and it would be super uncomfortable to admit to myself that I have done this wrong over potentially many, many years.
Thank you for writing this. I am an employer and see versions of the advice / similar techniques to patio11's post put into practice by candidates (ie used against us) with some regularity. It doesn't always work, and we try to be disciplined, but it helps fairly often and at worst does no harm as long as you're polite.
I strongly encourage people to read the post and not give up because of the unrelenting cynicism in these comments.
Yes, I have declined two job offers because they were unwilling to move on salary (among other things), but I have never had a job offer rescinded for bringing the issue up.
Does this work outside the US? In crappier markets it feels like there just ain't high money jobs. Like a US graduate engineer earns more than a 20ye ceo in other countries. Yeah I can negotiate another 10k but I ain't earning millions more over a decade.
It depends on the country and the company. For example, here in India:
- if you're negotiating with a US tech giant (FAANG, etc) from a position of strength (more than one offer, very good interview and past credentials), you can get away with almost anything, since they want great developers, and they don't mind paying above market. If you barely passed the interview, or you don't have a strong position, they'll just say take the offer or we won't go ahead.
- If you're negotiating with US-based startups or EU companies, then they might not want / be able to go very far with respect to salary (equity is doubly risky for the candidate if they aren't in the US), you can negotiate for great health insurance, more time off, fewer working hours, other benefits.
- If you're negotiating with Indian companies, they'll just hop on to the next candidate who passed the interview and is more desperate than you are. Most Indian companies tend to believe neither in fair wage, nor work life balance, so they won't negotiate properly on either. An employee is not just a replaceable cog, she cannot be allowed to exercise any sort of negotiation lest their current employees start getting ideas.
This is, in my experience, the biggest aspect of the whole process. If you go into a raise negotitation undervaluing yourself, you are always going to come out short. By looking at my role, how I help the company, and what it would take for them to replace my skillset (including training and learning company policies/procedures etc) I have massively improved my confidence in this area and been able to consistently negotiate much bigger raises.
Most companies would much rather throw $10-20k at a small problem to make it go away, instead of going through the hassle of a new hire and everything that goes with it.
I regularly exchange currency at the bank. There is a posted rate that I can get online. If I go to the teller, they will propose that rate as well, at which point I say "can I have the premium rate" and they say, ok, I can give you x - something 1% better or so.
Point is, I'm not negotiating with the bank teller, they have a flow chart they need to follow. For a lot of positions with big companies, it's going to be the same. There might be a path on the flowchart you can access, but you're not really negotiating. In some cases you may be able to break though this if there's a real person (not recruiter) that will push for you, but talking to recruiters / talent is like talking to the bank teller.
My bank has a trading desk, the information about it is not very public, neither are their contact details on the website.
But they have a phone number that I was given and I can call them whenever I need to convert currency worth more than €20k. The rates are much better, and they get almost mid-market by the time you ask them about €100k+ numbers.
The number has no waiting music, it rings, trader picks up and deal is done and money has been exchanged in my account in less than a minute.
There’s a non-zero chance that you don’t end up with the job whether you accept or negotiate. If you can accept some of those non-zero values, then yes negotiation is better by some definitions of better.
Personally if I get an offer I’m happy with, I accept it. If not, I either decline or negotiate. But if I was in a position where the worst possible outcome was me not getting the job at the current offer, I’d accept it.
The main thing that changed since when this article was written is that companies are much less in a rush than they used to to hire people, which means that a lot of mechanics described in the article fall apart.
In particular, companies don't really look at how much they spend to hire someone. They'll just wait for the hiring committee to be "really excited" about a candidate before making an offer.
By far the biggest value-add in terms of salary over my career has been, and this is probably very finance specific but still, having a very good relationship with a recruiter. A recruiter with a good network has massive incentives to repeatedly place you over the course of your career, and if he knows that you are a good employee then he will usually give you the context on the positions that allows you to safely negotiate raises.
You also get to learn what specific recruiter/job description lingo means, for example "position with a lot of opportunities to develop" = "the senior employee doing this job quit/convinced the management to hire a junior for this".
Patrick's "salary negotiation" piece has made the rounds here a number of times, and I always have the same reaction to it: It probably works, if you are already a software celebrity like Patrick, or some other highly sought after Captain of the software engineering industry. For us rank-and-file employee number 12887's, I just don't see it working--I've really never negotiated compensation significantly successfully in my 25+ year career. Here's how salary negotiation usually goes if you're not someone like John Carmack:
Them: We'd love to have you join the team! Here's your compensation letter, please get back to us within the next 2 weeks and we'll move forward.
You: Thank you, I believe my background and skills would suggest a compensation of $1.5X instead of $X. Is this possible with your hiring budget?
Them: The offer is for $X and we believe it is appropriate for your level.
You: Maybe my level should be higher then?
Them: Ha Ha
You: Looking at [website A, B, C] I see the average compensation for this role is $1.25X. Surely there is room to move this upward.
Them: We don't agree with that data. The offer is for $X. Shall we move forward?
You: What about equity or bonus, is there any flexibility with those numbers, or vacation time, or...?
Them: The offer is for $X. If you don't want the job, we can move on to one of our other 20 candidates who are in the pipeline for the role.
That's basically how salary negotiations went for almost the entirety of my career. If your results have been different, I'm kind of envious!
If you don't have a strong BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), you're not going to get very far with just asking.
"I received your offer for $X. I really enjoyed the interviews, meeting the team, and am intrigued by the problems I'd get to solve with them. Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X from another company and I need to make sure my family is provided for. If you would match it, I'm excited to join, but if your offer is firm at $X, I'm afraid I won't be taking it."
If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.
> Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X
If you can get multiple companies to time their interviews and offer stages perfectly and then get one of them to match the other, that’s quite lucky.
However, it’s not like it’s an easy solution. It’s transforming one problem into a much harder one: Now you have to get a second offer that’s even higher and get it at exactly the right time to use it as leverage. How do you negotiate that second offer to 1.25 * $X so you can leverage it to get the first to the same level? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.
“Just get a second offer for 25% more” is more of the wishful thinking negotiating strategy. In most cases it’s more realistic to set a target number and stick to it, being willing to walk away and continue the job search until it’s met.
Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps, and I had to answer within 3 days.
I do not get how is anyone realistically supposed to coincide the multiple offers they get. Unless you are already in an extremely privileged position, I cannot even imagine how you can do that.
pretty much, my first bigco job I made the mistake of only applying to the one place (had a job already, was looking for a change but without any urgency), and they would not budge on salary, just said the offer was already very generous and at the top of their salary band for my level. the next time I was job hunting I had just been laid off and so was frantically applying to a lot of places, ended up getting several offers and that definitely made a difference (though interestingly enough no one was willing to negotiate on base pay, but they would on things like stock and signing bonuses)
> If they really just need someone to hold down a chair
I would not jump to this conclusion. The company might have a very deliberate compensation strategy. Giving $Y instead of $X to a newcomer at a given level without aligning other people at the same level to $Y raises serious concerns.
As a company, you don't have to let yourself bullied by other companies.
"rank-and-file employee number 12887"s don't tend to find it easy to get multiple job offers at once to use as leverage ! Even more so in today's climate
I don't think you even have to say that you have competing offer $1.25X.
Simply stating you have a competing offer also for $X is completely believable and will probably get you a improved offer from one of the two interviewing teams.
Even if it doesn't and you accept at $X then at the very least your new employer now knows that you liked them best. Which is not a bad way to start a new job.
Either way I would never lie and say I had an offer when I didn't. Lying in general is a bad faith strategy and will often come back on you at some point.
> If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.
Except for super stars (literally, nerd famous people), 100% of companies and job offers will just let you walk away. One thing that I tell myself as a normie employee: There are many more people qualified to do my job than there are jobs.
Some perspective from the employer side of salary negotiations: It’s not hard to recognize when someone is following the patio11 salary negotiation guide after you recognize the pattern.
In my case I was already advocating for upper end pay packages for people joining us. One thing you learn quickly is that despite all the Internet talk about having a BATNA or putting companies in a bidding war against each other is that the majority of candidates really don’t have other options to even compare against.
Combine this with the one-size-fits-all salary negotiation advice and a problem arises: The only way they can feel like they’ve won the negotiation is to fight for some arbitrary increase and then have the company give it to them.
My mistake early on was trying to give people the best possible offer out of the gate that I could possibly justify. Many people took it because it was a big raise for them or they understood what we had discussed. However, you could tell when someone was reading a compensation negotiation guide because it was like the number did not actually matter. The only thing they cared about was getting something extra added on top of it. Some people would be so tunnel visioned on this idea of getting the extra bump that they’d threaten to walk from an excellent offer over something trivial like a $5K bump
So what’s the strategy? You start holding back that last little bit of your budget for the inevitable up negotiation round, then you give it to them when they do their negotiating script that the internet guide told them to follow.
If the person doesn’t negotiate, you then surprise them with it as bonus plan or something similar.
It works, but I hated it. Eventually you get a feel for who’s likely to play the negotiation script and who was not, so you could somewhat predict it most of the time.
> My mistake early on was trying to give people the best possible offer out of the gate that I could possibly justify. Many people took it because it was a big raise for them or they understood what we had discussed. However, you could tell when someone was reading a compensation negotiation guide because it was like the number did not actually matter. The only thing they cared about was getting something extra added on top of it. Some people would be so tunnel visioned on this idea of getting the extra bump that they’d threaten to walk from an excellent offer over something trivial like a $5K bump
This reminds me on my experience selling things on local version of eBay. No matter how good of a price it was for a used item, people would still try to lower it... until I just started setting higher prices from the get go and then selling for more after some arbitrary small drop in price after "negotiating". Wierd how people work.
> One thing you learn quickly is that despite all the Internet talk about having a BATNA or putting companies in a bidding war against each other is that the majority of candidates really don’t have other options to even compare against.
You also "learned" this by your company themselves making it hard for candidates to have multiple offers, as you seemed to imply in another comment that you shorten the timeline near the end (after no doubt having a long application and interview process, which I'm sure is rationalised as industry standard) to prevent multiple offers ("we need to move on to the next candidate quickly")
And even had the audacity to say that people who want to extend the process aren't serious, knowing full well most companies drag on the application and interviewing process for weeks and months. It's all just power dynamics and everything else is nonsense
I'm not sure we need HR PR on this site, on this post about trying to bump salary, in this very tough climate.
On the retail side, wasn't there a well-publicized failure of a company that attempted honest pricing and sales fell because customers loved nickel-and-diming themselves with coupons and loyalty programs?
This could not be less true and I really wish people would stop spreading this idea, because it's costing other people lots of money. In fact, the Venn diagram mapping "software celebrities" like Patrick and expert negotiators has not much overlap at all. You've never heard of some of the best-compensated developers I know (and they don't work on "celebrity" projects, either); meanwhile, I can think of multiple "celebrities" who have gotten extremely raw deals --- one, for instance, was brought in to lead engineering & R&D at a security company working against organized crime, and didn't even get any equity.
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
Does this sort of stuff still work for people who can do Python or Javascript just as well as thousands of others? I expect most companies today to simply stop talking to a typical candidate if they refused to tell their number first.
One of the key points to patio11's article is that there is only upside to negotiation with no downside. You are basically saying: negotiation doesn't work so why bother. Please stop.
I once negotiated a large raise at a job where afterwards my boss told me that he could not have justified giving me that raise on his own, but because I asked for it he was able to make the case.
Negotiating often works. It has no downside for you (besides making you feel uncomfortable) and major upsides that last well beyond your current role.
I literally had that happen to me at an annual review.
I got a great review and asked for more money than the raise my boss offered. He had no authorization to go that high, but because I asked for more and having had a good review gave me a strong position, he went to the VP and got approval for it.
It's just business: you're selling a skill. Try to get a good price for it.
As I note frequently, I have a small pile of thank you letters as a result of the negotiation piece. Very few are written by people with an outsized public profile.
How many people do you think would hit that bar in the industry? Hundreds? I have hundreds of letters with numbers attached to them to say nothing of how many people simply negotiate, get the comp bump, and do not feel the need to email me about it.
Thanks for the reply. I don't know what to say... I'm not going to argue with your thank you letters, I'm sure your advice has helped many people! Somehow this became one of my most highly upvoted comments ever on HN, so my view of it seems to also be striking home for a lot of us.
I'm not trying to say all that matters an outsized profile. I agree that if you have that rare intersection of: 1. acing the interview, 2. a strong background with well-known companies, and 3. (critically) are job-hunting during a hiring bull market, to the point where the company cannot pick-and-choose, and they feel they must hire you, then sure, negotiation will bear some fruit. OR, if you managed to get multiple offers. I think a lot of us have never seen either of those situations.
1) after reading the original post immediately linked it to a friend who had an outstanding offer. She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
2) personally, I don't think of myself as a particularly aggressive negotiator. However, I have been able to truthfully discuss compensation using the tactics described with recruiters to get leveling and comp where I've wanted it to be for my last couple of jobs. Yes, I always had multiple offers. That's part of negotiating.
More generally, though, I think spending 30+ minutes (reading the piece and more) thinking about negotiating has helped me build a better mental model for what to bring to the table.
> She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
Either she had a competing offer, or the company she is interviewing for has weak processes. A company yielding "a significant raise from fairly light negotiating" is very worrying IMO.
Think about it: what does that tell you about the next newcomer that will come after you?
That’s why Patrick said it helps to have a strong reputation going in. Still, you can absolutely negotiate—just make sure you have real leverage. That usually means a competing offer from another solid company (ideally a competitor).
Keep this in mind: it’s really hard for companies to hire good engineers. The onsite-to-offer ratio might be 20:1 or worse. So when a recruiter says they’ll just move on to the next candidate, they’re probably bluffing.
But what if they do have 20 people lined up? Then you don’t have leverage with that company—and that’s fine. Take the offer if it’s good enough, or walk and try elsewhere.
P.S., a fun anecdote: when Netflix was extending an offer to a renowned engineer, he brought his PR to negotiate. Apparently, it worked well for him.
P.P.S, always interview for a higher title. I get it — it’s tough with hot companies like OpenAI. But for most places, it’s worth a shot. At the very least, don’t aim lower than your current level. It’s funny how the human mind works—interviewers anchor their expectations to your title. And ironically, a senior engineer interview is often just as hard as a staff-level one. If you’re feeling cynical, just remember: title inflation is real and everywhere, and plenty of high-level ICs are great at navigating politics, drawing boxes, and sounding confident, but not necessarily skilled at offering real values like solving hard engineering problems. So if you can’t beat the game, why not play it?
I am the 12887 too. Luckily applied at the place in emergency mode and was perfect fit. Negotiated +6%. Yeah! In the second year it was reduced by 3% coupling my bonus to unachievable goals. As someone wrote on HN: it is not their first rodeo. HR knows how to attract and get to the right salary level afterwards. What can I do? Swallowing is the only way. There are no job ads in my area.
> HR knows how to attract and get to the right salary level afterwards.
This has to be the key point. They do this all the time as part of their job. You do it every few years, or maybe every decade. Of course they are better at it.
L5 at FAANG and adjacent companies (Airbnb, Uber, Stripe, Block, Databricks, etc) is a rank and file, employee number 12887 rule. Yet it is compensated in the mid six figures, and the ranges are easily more than $100k wide. Position in the range depends on a number of factors, famously stock market timing is a big one, but competing offers and negotiation are certainly in there.
I would find this less confusing of a top comment, if it did not ignore vital information and advice that already is in Patricks piece (and apparently ignored, even after having seen it "a number of times"?). To anyone agreeing with this position, I would recommend giving it another read.
Which is not to say that this advice must lead to a raise for everyone who reads it, but if your current assessment of the piece is "this only works for super stars" then you have definitely not really ingested the ideas offered (but you might be making excuses for why that is).
be ready to walk away from their offer. Thats the only secret for negotiations, there is no other secret sauce.
>Them: The offer is for $X.
You: Thank you, but I will continue my final interview process with [CompetitorA] and [CompetitorB]
>Them: How much more money do you want to accept our offer and terminate interview process with our main competitors?
You: Add Y% and I will sign the job offer right now.
This approach doesn't require you to lie, or photoshop fake offer letter (like some bad people advice on places like Blind), and doesn't require you to arrange a direct bidding war - all are huge red flags for any employer.
Again: Be honest and upfront, full integrity, never lie, dont make it about money, but rather about the mission of the job
You don't have to be a star programmer, fame isn't the only form of leverage.
If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.
Them: we offer 250k-350k
Me: I don't consider anything below 500
The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.
The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?
The proliferation of AI and LLMs has completely obliterated leverage.
Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.
Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.
I’m not a captain of industry by any means but I’m very credentialed in my niche of AWS cloud consulting specializing in app development since 2023 - 7 years of experience, 3.5 years working at AWS (Professional Services) open source contributions and a major contributor to popular official open source “AWS Solutions” in a certain niche and much more experience in general app dev - and I was not able to negotiate more than 5-10% for certain opportunities and some I couldn’t push them for more money at all.
My comp is good for non FAANG especially seeing that I work remotely in a non HCOL no state tax city. But it’s hard for normies to do significant negotiations. I also have “unlimited PTO” and fully plan to take 20-25 days at least.
I have never not successfully negotiated a comp over up since I was 19. Even for college jobs I’d at least get an extra $1/hr. The rest vary from small bumps up $50k extra from Google without a competing offer.
Where I work, there are basically set pay levels that one isn't allowed to fiddle with all that much, all the way to the CEO
This way, you don't get outlier high salaries for strong negotiators (which causes hurt feelings down the road for weaker negotiators), nor low salaries for weaker negotiators. Downside if someone pushes negotiation, there's basically no wiggle room. And the salaries themselves are a bit on the generous side of fair, so if someone thinks they're worth more, they're welcome to prove it because they probably aren't aligned with market rates.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but it wasn’t clear to me reading your comment: how many times did you attempt negotiation and have it fail in roughly the way you describe?
I’m not a celebrity or superstar, and I’ve successfully used his techniques several times. The very first time it resulted in $20k improvement over the initial salary offer. Another time it resulted in an additional $40k in signing bonus.
Most recently it resulted in a modest $5k boost to the offered salary.
But the level of success you are likely to experience entirely depends on the alternatives that you have and the alternatives they have.
(I should also note that I’ve never been located anywhere like SF.)
You really have one option per scenario over a total of two scenarios as #12887, and they are "yes I will take this job," and "if you want me to leave my present employer, you would have to offer more than my current salary."
McKenzie's advice has worked for me every single time. I've managed 10% to 20% at every job since graduating (sometimes with leadership bending a lot of rules for it).
This was before I started writing my blog.
There are jobs where I suspect I couldn't get a raise, but they're all roles where I would be unable to differentiate myself from a commodified ultra-scrub engineer (think the cheap labour you get from generic Azure consultancies).
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the "salary expectations" question in the initial phone screen or first stage. In my experience, I have never been asked that question and then moved onto the next step in the process, regardless of whether or how I answer the question.
So I am left thinking they are just collecting salary metrics for the position.
Interviewing while employed, I’ll happily give my “I’m not considering anything lower than <this>” number in the first 15 minutes of discussion. I’m not interested in spending more time without general alignment on that.
The few times early on that I didn’t do that, it was a giant waste of time.
If I was interviewing from a position where I needed a job soon, I would be less inclined to be that upfront, of course.
Never (ever) respond to this question early in the process. The company is just collecting market data.
Tell them that the salary should be negotiated at the end if the process is successful.
If they tell you "but we need this to make sure we're not wasting your time and ours", tell them "well give me a range for what you can do and I'll tell you if you're wasting my time"
I've always said "I'm more interested in finding the right role, than I am in the salary, and I am sure we can come to an agreement if we feel it's a good fit". If they push further than that, I ask what sort of range they are looking at to make sure we're broadly aligned and not wasting each others time.
There are two fundamental ways to win a negotiation. By "win", I mean achieve an outcome outside the norm, such as an above market rate salary.
1. Negotiate from a position of strength
You pointed out a couple of these, like when you have a strong personal brand (like Patrick) or when the market dynamics favour employees. The former is not something you can control so, when the market is in this place, you should take advantage of it to propel yourself. However, the former is completely within your control. You can spend some time and effort building a personal brand. Many people discount the value of a brand and the effort spent building one, but it totally works. I have marketing-savvy friends who, since early in their career as juniors, spent a lot of time on LinkedIn thought leadership & brand building. And it totally works. In fact, I have one such friend who was recently part of a restructuring layoff (i.e., not related to performance). Because of the brand they built, once they posted about the layoff on LinkedIn, they had 12 offers within a week all higher than their previous salary.
Another area where you can gain leverage is when you already work at a company that wants to retain you. The only time a business will bend over backwards for an employee is when the conversation is about retention. To make the conversation about retention you need to be completely willing to walk, and your negotiating position is strengthened if you have counter offers. To maintain your political capital (which will be important if you stay) you need to be careful about how you play this game. I've worked with people in the past who approached the business confrontationally, saying "if you don't give me $X, I quit" - that strategy only works once. But there are ways to structure this conversation where you don't leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
2. Care about something different than your counterpart
Often the person you're negotiating with cares the most about optimising certain metrics. You should try to spend some time figuring out what those metrics are and see if there is something different that makes a difference in your life.
e.g., your employer might be really under the gun about managing fixed salaries. This is very common in a lot of businesses to try to manage their headcount. So they might be more willing to give you a $50k cash bonus compared to a $25k salary increase. Or maybe they're more open to an extra week or two of vacation vs. salary.
This phenomenon has been really helpful for me in the last year. I run my own business, but my business is fully bootstrapped, so I don't have a board or any investors to please. As a result, I'm not as motivated by ARR as other SaaS companies. Sometimes I encounter customers who would rather pay me a 3-4x one-time fee instead of ARR. By making these deals I immediately guarantee what would have otherwise been four years of cash (potentially with a cancellation risk during the term). A VC-funded SaaS business would almost never make a deal like this, because such a deal would not have a material impact on valuation.
Another example - I was moving recently and sold some furniture. I was chatting with somebody who was an optometrist who wanted to buy a few things, which I listed at $200. They offered $100. I countered, asking for the right to use their employee discount, and ended up getting $500 in value.
So you should also spend some time trying to figure out what your negotiation counterpart cares about. Maybe there is an arbitrage where you can both get exactly what you want, instead of needing to find an outcome where one person wins and the other one loses.
Why would one negotiate on a few hundred dollars when they're apparently capable of negotiating deals worth hundreds of thousands? In my opinion, the marginal benefit does not outweigh the potential downside of being perceived as petty.
The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that they simply enjoy the negotiation process itself. I guess most of us do not.
They profit from turning you away because after the Nth person turns down their low-ball salary they can use this to justify bringing in more H1B workers because "we just can't find enough candidates for this position". They hire an H1B who happily works for 0.8X and decreases the average that much more.
I do not love when salary negotiation comes up on message boards, because it attracts in roughly equal parts: people with impostor syndrome, LARPers, extroverted neurotypicals who think it's "obvious", and nervous junior developers that might need real advice but end up being misled by some or all of the above.
The advice you'll find online for salary negotiation is predicated on you already deciding that you want to do it. If you're worried about being "employee 12887" and having no leverage for negotiation, sorry to say, you've already talked yourself out of it. Come back to this idea when you've decided that the offers on the table are "decent, but I can do better".
Nobody can make that choice for you. You have to do it yourself. And if you don't, yes, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table by not negotiating. However, the money you're leaving very likely won't be the difference between "can I make my rent/mortgage payment?" or not. If it is, maybe you're applying for the wrong positions.
TL;DR - If you're telling yourself a story about why it won't work for you, you're absolutely right.
I can tell you that most hiring managers and recruiters find it offensive, and the conversation quickly shifts to how much do we care about playing games with this candidate who seems a bit reckless in suggesting a salary they know isn’t realistic.
I find it offensive and playing games when they won't give me the ranges.
I've been at companies which paid me 1/2 of what some my peers earned. I don't have time for these games. Give me your salary ranges for the position and I can negotiate. Otherwise I'm pulling numbers out of my ass.
The recruiter wants to pay me as close to 0 as possible, and it's up to me to push back on that.
> I can tell you that most hiring managers and recruiters find it offensive [...] suggesting a salary they know isn’t realistic.
But how are you going to go know?
In most lines of business, prices are public knowledge. In a retail setting, for example, you can look at the price tags on the shelf, in commodities we have price data published on a continual basis, etc. Anyone and everyone can just look if they want to see an effective range of what others are selling similar products for. This provides a decent mechanism for price discovery.
But labor prices, in the US at least, tend to be hush-hush (slowly starting to change, but still early days). Even where you occasionally find people opening up, there isn't a consistent metric used (e.g. some talk base salary, others talk total compensation, no mention of inputs [like how many hours are required to fulfill the salary], etc.), if they are even telling you the truth. And where you have the full picture on exacting price, you aren't apt to know much about the person. Someone doing the same job might truly be worth half/double what you are. People are not commodities.
Hiring managers and recruiters usually get to see term sheets across many people along with background on those people, so they have a reasonable idea of what is realistic for a person of similar stature, but that doesn't help the seller. And it is usually the seller's job to make the first price move, so all one can do is make a complete guess.
Employers have long pushed for that secrecy exactly so they have the benefit of knowing what the seller doesn't. And fair enough. You can't blame them for wanting to leverage that advantage if they can get away with it. But, to then be offended when someone isn't aware? You can't have it both ways.
When talking with recruiters, I usually decline to state the first number politely - saying something like "salary isn't the only reason why I'd take a job, and I always look at the whole package as well as the role. I'm sure your offer will be competitive."
On forms where I have to put a range, I put $1.00.
Like a lot of things in life, the battle is won before it begins. Having alternative offers, doing well on your career and interviews, these are all things that will grow your salary.
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Telling others how “the market” is when you only have your very limited subjective and anecdotal experience to share is a bit bold, and probably dispiriting to read for others that do not have the same experience. Do you really have a stat sig number of interviews and offer to say that the market merely tightened a bit?
Are all the people here reporting a shift in their ability to get a job in the last year not even good enough to pass the bar in a normal team ?
I share your experience of having had no issue, but we have to recognize that our specific role, history, location, network, sales skills and luck all play a role, and may not be a general rule.
Aren't people that complain about this not being possible not doing exactly the same? Maybe we can land on: This is a comment section. People bring their own views of things.
The anchor here is Patricks ideas. I am not sure if his data raises to the level of statistical significance, but it's clearly not nothing and, unless he is outright lying, seems to yield significant positive results.
What people in this thread offer on the other end is fairly light, ignores a lot of Patricks advice, tries to make special cases where there are none, and is really a lot of regular grade negativity and excuses – and then claiming that the advice does not work, when, what they really mean is: I really do not want any advice, because I am a grown up person and it would be super uncomfortable to admit to myself that I have done this wrong over potentially many, many years.
I strongly encourage people to read the post and not give up because of the unrelenting cynicism in these comments.
I will definitely try once a human deigns to speak with me.
- if you're negotiating with a US tech giant (FAANG, etc) from a position of strength (more than one offer, very good interview and past credentials), you can get away with almost anything, since they want great developers, and they don't mind paying above market. If you barely passed the interview, or you don't have a strong position, they'll just say take the offer or we won't go ahead.
- If you're negotiating with US-based startups or EU companies, then they might not want / be able to go very far with respect to salary (equity is doubly risky for the candidate if they aren't in the US), you can negotiate for great health insurance, more time off, fewer working hours, other benefits.
- If you're negotiating with Indian companies, they'll just hop on to the next candidate who passed the interview and is more desperate than you are. Most Indian companies tend to believe neither in fair wage, nor work life balance, so they won't negotiate properly on either. An employee is not just a replaceable cog, she cannot be allowed to exercise any sort of negotiation lest their current employees start getting ideas.
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…and, CRITICALLY, as Patrick’s article points out, it compounds each time you switch jobs.
This makes it absolutely huge over your lifetime.
This is, in my experience, the biggest aspect of the whole process. If you go into a raise negotitation undervaluing yourself, you are always going to come out short. By looking at my role, how I help the company, and what it would take for them to replace my skillset (including training and learning company policies/procedures etc) I have massively improved my confidence in this area and been able to consistently negotiate much bigger raises.
Most companies would much rather throw $10-20k at a small problem to make it go away, instead of going through the hassle of a new hire and everything that goes with it.
You're wrong. You got lucky, that's all.
You're also a product designer, not a SWE which most of us are.
Point is, I'm not negotiating with the bank teller, they have a flow chart they need to follow. For a lot of positions with big companies, it's going to be the same. There might be a path on the flowchart you can access, but you're not really negotiating. In some cases you may be able to break though this if there's a real person (not recruiter) that will push for you, but talking to recruiters / talent is like talking to the bank teller.
But they have a phone number that I was given and I can call them whenever I need to convert currency worth more than €20k. The rates are much better, and they get almost mid-market by the time you ask them about €100k+ numbers.
The number has no waiting music, it rings, trader picks up and deal is done and money has been exchanged in my account in less than a minute.
Personally if I get an offer I’m happy with, I accept it. If not, I either decline or negotiate. But if I was in a position where the worst possible outcome was me not getting the job at the current offer, I’d accept it.
In particular, companies don't really look at how much they spend to hire someone. They'll just wait for the hiring committee to be "really excited" about a candidate before making an offer.
You also get to learn what specific recruiter/job description lingo means, for example "position with a lot of opportunities to develop" = "the senior employee doing this job quit/convinced the management to hire a junior for this".
Them: We'd love to have you join the team! Here's your compensation letter, please get back to us within the next 2 weeks and we'll move forward.
You: Thank you, I believe my background and skills would suggest a compensation of $1.5X instead of $X. Is this possible with your hiring budget?
Them: The offer is for $X and we believe it is appropriate for your level.
You: Maybe my level should be higher then?
Them: Ha Ha
You: Looking at [website A, B, C] I see the average compensation for this role is $1.25X. Surely there is room to move this upward.
Them: We don't agree with that data. The offer is for $X. Shall we move forward?
You: What about equity or bonus, is there any flexibility with those numbers, or vacation time, or...?
Them: The offer is for $X. If you don't want the job, we can move on to one of our other 20 candidates who are in the pipeline for the role.
That's basically how salary negotiations went for almost the entirety of my career. If your results have been different, I'm kind of envious!
"I received your offer for $X. I really enjoyed the interviews, meeting the team, and am intrigued by the problems I'd get to solve with them. Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X from another company and I need to make sure my family is provided for. If you would match it, I'm excited to join, but if your offer is firm at $X, I'm afraid I won't be taking it."
If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.
If you can get multiple companies to time their interviews and offer stages perfectly and then get one of them to match the other, that’s quite lucky.
However, it’s not like it’s an easy solution. It’s transforming one problem into a much harder one: Now you have to get a second offer that’s even higher and get it at exactly the right time to use it as leverage. How do you negotiate that second offer to 1.25 * $X so you can leverage it to get the first to the same level? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.
“Just get a second offer for 25% more” is more of the wishful thinking negotiating strategy. In most cases it’s more realistic to set a target number and stick to it, being willing to walk away and continue the job search until it’s met.
I do not get how is anyone realistically supposed to coincide the multiple offers they get. Unless you are already in an extremely privileged position, I cannot even imagine how you can do that.
I would not jump to this conclusion. The company might have a very deliberate compensation strategy. Giving $Y instead of $X to a newcomer at a given level without aligning other people at the same level to $Y raises serious concerns.
As a company, you don't have to let yourself bullied by other companies.
Simply stating you have a competing offer also for $X is completely believable and will probably get you a improved offer from one of the two interviewing teams.
Even if it doesn't and you accept at $X then at the very least your new employer now knows that you liked them best. Which is not a bad way to start a new job.
Either way I would never lie and say I had an offer when I didn't. Lying in general is a bad faith strategy and will often come back on you at some point.
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So in reality, your BATNA is your current job (if you’re employed).
In my case I was already advocating for upper end pay packages for people joining us. One thing you learn quickly is that despite all the Internet talk about having a BATNA or putting companies in a bidding war against each other is that the majority of candidates really don’t have other options to even compare against.
Combine this with the one-size-fits-all salary negotiation advice and a problem arises: The only way they can feel like they’ve won the negotiation is to fight for some arbitrary increase and then have the company give it to them.
My mistake early on was trying to give people the best possible offer out of the gate that I could possibly justify. Many people took it because it was a big raise for them or they understood what we had discussed. However, you could tell when someone was reading a compensation negotiation guide because it was like the number did not actually matter. The only thing they cared about was getting something extra added on top of it. Some people would be so tunnel visioned on this idea of getting the extra bump that they’d threaten to walk from an excellent offer over something trivial like a $5K bump
So what’s the strategy? You start holding back that last little bit of your budget for the inevitable up negotiation round, then you give it to them when they do their negotiating script that the internet guide told them to follow.
If the person doesn’t negotiate, you then surprise them with it as bonus plan or something similar.
It works, but I hated it. Eventually you get a feel for who’s likely to play the negotiation script and who was not, so you could somewhat predict it most of the time.
This reminds me on my experience selling things on local version of eBay. No matter how good of a price it was for a used item, people would still try to lower it... until I just started setting higher prices from the get go and then selling for more after some arbitrary small drop in price after "negotiating". Wierd how people work.
You also "learned" this by your company themselves making it hard for candidates to have multiple offers, as you seemed to imply in another comment that you shorten the timeline near the end (after no doubt having a long application and interview process, which I'm sure is rationalised as industry standard) to prevent multiple offers ("we need to move on to the next candidate quickly")
And even had the audacity to say that people who want to extend the process aren't serious, knowing full well most companies drag on the application and interviewing process for weeks and months. It's all just power dynamics and everything else is nonsense
I'm not sure we need HR PR on this site, on this post about trying to bump salary, in this very tough climate.
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
I once negotiated a large raise at a job where afterwards my boss told me that he could not have justified giving me that raise on his own, but because I asked for it he was able to make the case.
Negotiating often works. It has no downside for you (besides making you feel uncomfortable) and major upsides that last well beyond your current role.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2014/03/13/wh...
I got a great review and asked for more money than the raise my boss offered. He had no authorization to go that high, but because I asked for more and having had a good review gave me a strong position, he went to the VP and got approval for it.
It's just business: you're selling a skill. Try to get a good price for it.
How many people do you think would hit that bar in the industry? Hundreds? I have hundreds of letters with numbers attached to them to say nothing of how many people simply negotiate, get the comp bump, and do not feel the need to email me about it.
I'm not trying to say all that matters an outsized profile. I agree that if you have that rare intersection of: 1. acing the interview, 2. a strong background with well-known companies, and 3. (critically) are job-hunting during a hiring bull market, to the point where the company cannot pick-and-choose, and they feel they must hire you, then sure, negotiation will bear some fruit. OR, if you managed to get multiple offers. I think a lot of us have never seen either of those situations.
1) after reading the original post immediately linked it to a friend who had an outstanding offer. She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
2) personally, I don't think of myself as a particularly aggressive negotiator. However, I have been able to truthfully discuss compensation using the tactics described with recruiters to get leveling and comp where I've wanted it to be for my last couple of jobs. Yes, I always had multiple offers. That's part of negotiating.
More generally, though, I think spending 30+ minutes (reading the piece and more) thinking about negotiating has helped me build a better mental model for what to bring to the table.
Either she had a competing offer, or the company she is interviewing for has weak processes. A company yielding "a significant raise from fairly light negotiating" is very worrying IMO.
Think about it: what does that tell you about the next newcomer that will come after you?
Keep this in mind: it’s really hard for companies to hire good engineers. The onsite-to-offer ratio might be 20:1 or worse. So when a recruiter says they’ll just move on to the next candidate, they’re probably bluffing.
But what if they do have 20 people lined up? Then you don’t have leverage with that company—and that’s fine. Take the offer if it’s good enough, or walk and try elsewhere.
P.S., a fun anecdote: when Netflix was extending an offer to a renowned engineer, he brought his PR to negotiate. Apparently, it worked well for him.
P.P.S, always interview for a higher title. I get it — it’s tough with hot companies like OpenAI. But for most places, it’s worth a shot. At the very least, don’t aim lower than your current level. It’s funny how the human mind works—interviewers anchor their expectations to your title. And ironically, a senior engineer interview is often just as hard as a staff-level one. If you’re feeling cynical, just remember: title inflation is real and everywhere, and plenty of high-level ICs are great at navigating politics, drawing boxes, and sounding confident, but not necessarily skilled at offering real values like solving hard engineering problems. So if you can’t beat the game, why not play it?
This has to be the key point. They do this all the time as part of their job. You do it every few years, or maybe every decade. Of course they are better at it.
The only thing you need is leverage, and yes, rank-and-file are not going to have a lot of leverage at a FAANG.
You can’t negotiate if you’re not willing to let the job go through.
Which is not to say that this advice must lead to a raise for everyone who reads it, but if your current assessment of the piece is "this only works for super stars" then you have definitely not really ingested the ideas offered (but you might be making excuses for why that is).
>Them: The offer is for $X.
You: Thank you, but I will continue my final interview process with [CompetitorA] and [CompetitorB]
>Them: How much more money do you want to accept our offer and terminate interview process with our main competitors?
You: Add Y% and I will sign the job offer right now.
This approach doesn't require you to lie, or photoshop fake offer letter (like some bad people advice on places like Blind), and doesn't require you to arrange a direct bidding war - all are huge red flags for any employer.
Again: Be honest and upfront, full integrity, never lie, dont make it about money, but rather about the mission of the job
If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.
Them: we offer 250k-350k
Me: I don't consider anything below 500
The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.
The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?
> 250k-350k
> land an HFT gig
Respectfully, your perspective may be a bit skewed? OP's context was "us rank-and-file employee number 12887's".
Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.
Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.
My comp is good for non FAANG especially seeing that I work remotely in a non HCOL no state tax city. But it’s hard for normies to do significant negotiations. I also have “unlimited PTO” and fully plan to take 20-25 days at least.
Was true in 2012, remains true today.
My two jobs since I've been able to get more by... just asking for more, even without competing offers.
Maybe we’re just living in different worlds.
This way, you don't get outlier high salaries for strong negotiators (which causes hurt feelings down the road for weaker negotiators), nor low salaries for weaker negotiators. Downside if someone pushes negotiation, there's basically no wiggle room. And the salaries themselves are a bit on the generous side of fair, so if someone thinks they're worth more, they're welcome to prove it because they probably aren't aligned with market rates.
Most recently it resulted in a modest $5k boost to the offered salary.
But the level of success you are likely to experience entirely depends on the alternatives that you have and the alternatives they have.
(I should also note that I’ve never been located anywhere like SF.)
This was before I started writing my blog.
There are jobs where I suspect I couldn't get a raise, but they're all roles where I would be unable to differentiate myself from a commodified ultra-scrub engineer (think the cheap labour you get from generic Azure consultancies).
So I am left thinking they are just collecting salary metrics for the position.
The few times early on that I didn’t do that, it was a giant waste of time.
If I was interviewing from a position where I needed a job soon, I would be less inclined to be that upfront, of course.
Tell them that the salary should be negotiated at the end if the process is successful.
If they tell you "but we need this to make sure we're not wasting your time and ours", tell them "well give me a range for what you can do and I'll tell you if you're wasting my time"
i'm usually lucky if i can get one offer when interviewing. no room to negotiate that way...
1. Negotiate from a position of strength
You pointed out a couple of these, like when you have a strong personal brand (like Patrick) or when the market dynamics favour employees. The former is not something you can control so, when the market is in this place, you should take advantage of it to propel yourself. However, the former is completely within your control. You can spend some time and effort building a personal brand. Many people discount the value of a brand and the effort spent building one, but it totally works. I have marketing-savvy friends who, since early in their career as juniors, spent a lot of time on LinkedIn thought leadership & brand building. And it totally works. In fact, I have one such friend who was recently part of a restructuring layoff (i.e., not related to performance). Because of the brand they built, once they posted about the layoff on LinkedIn, they had 12 offers within a week all higher than their previous salary.
Another area where you can gain leverage is when you already work at a company that wants to retain you. The only time a business will bend over backwards for an employee is when the conversation is about retention. To make the conversation about retention you need to be completely willing to walk, and your negotiating position is strengthened if you have counter offers. To maintain your political capital (which will be important if you stay) you need to be careful about how you play this game. I've worked with people in the past who approached the business confrontationally, saying "if you don't give me $X, I quit" - that strategy only works once. But there are ways to structure this conversation where you don't leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
2. Care about something different than your counterpart
Often the person you're negotiating with cares the most about optimising certain metrics. You should try to spend some time figuring out what those metrics are and see if there is something different that makes a difference in your life.
e.g., your employer might be really under the gun about managing fixed salaries. This is very common in a lot of businesses to try to manage their headcount. So they might be more willing to give you a $50k cash bonus compared to a $25k salary increase. Or maybe they're more open to an extra week or two of vacation vs. salary.
This phenomenon has been really helpful for me in the last year. I run my own business, but my business is fully bootstrapped, so I don't have a board or any investors to please. As a result, I'm not as motivated by ARR as other SaaS companies. Sometimes I encounter customers who would rather pay me a 3-4x one-time fee instead of ARR. By making these deals I immediately guarantee what would have otherwise been four years of cash (potentially with a cancellation risk during the term). A VC-funded SaaS business would almost never make a deal like this, because such a deal would not have a material impact on valuation.
Another example - I was moving recently and sold some furniture. I was chatting with somebody who was an optometrist who wanted to buy a few things, which I listed at $200. They offered $100. I countered, asking for the right to use their employee discount, and ended up getting $500 in value.
So you should also spend some time trying to figure out what your negotiation counterpart cares about. Maybe there is an arbitrage where you can both get exactly what you want, instead of needing to find an outcome where one person wins and the other one loses.
The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that they simply enjoy the negotiation process itself. I guess most of us do not.
The advice you'll find online for salary negotiation is predicated on you already deciding that you want to do it. If you're worried about being "employee 12887" and having no leverage for negotiation, sorry to say, you've already talked yourself out of it. Come back to this idea when you've decided that the offers on the table are "decent, but I can do better".
Nobody can make that choice for you. You have to do it yourself. And if you don't, yes, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table by not negotiating. However, the money you're leaving very likely won't be the difference between "can I make my rent/mortgage payment?" or not. If it is, maybe you're applying for the wrong positions.
TL;DR - If you're telling yourself a story about why it won't work for you, you're absolutely right.
I've been at companies which paid me 1/2 of what some my peers earned. I don't have time for these games. Give me your salary ranges for the position and I can negotiate. Otherwise I'm pulling numbers out of my ass.
The recruiter wants to pay me as close to 0 as possible, and it's up to me to push back on that.
But how are you going to go know?
In most lines of business, prices are public knowledge. In a retail setting, for example, you can look at the price tags on the shelf, in commodities we have price data published on a continual basis, etc. Anyone and everyone can just look if they want to see an effective range of what others are selling similar products for. This provides a decent mechanism for price discovery.
But labor prices, in the US at least, tend to be hush-hush (slowly starting to change, but still early days). Even where you occasionally find people opening up, there isn't a consistent metric used (e.g. some talk base salary, others talk total compensation, no mention of inputs [like how many hours are required to fulfill the salary], etc.), if they are even telling you the truth. And where you have the full picture on exacting price, you aren't apt to know much about the person. Someone doing the same job might truly be worth half/double what you are. People are not commodities.
Hiring managers and recruiters usually get to see term sheets across many people along with background on those people, so they have a reasonable idea of what is realistic for a person of similar stature, but that doesn't help the seller. And it is usually the seller's job to make the first price move, so all one can do is make a complete guess.
Employers have long pushed for that secrecy exactly so they have the benefit of knowing what the seller doesn't. And fair enough. You can't blame them for wanting to leverage that advantage if they can get away with it. But, to then be offended when someone isn't aware? You can't have it both ways.
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On forms where I have to put a range, I put $1.00.