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 Negotiation is one of the better ways to improve your compensation and progress your career while engaging in the less privileged side of wage slavery. Goons employing negotiation tactics during salary negotiations frequently end up gaining multiple thousands of dollars a year in additional compensation, more paid time off, and more valuable benefits. KYOON GRIFFEY JR has set up a shared spreadsheet that shows just how much total benefit negotiating compensation has brought goons. In many cases, simply asking and being confident is enough to carry you to victory, but it's important to understand a little bit of negotiation theory and a few hard and fast rules to succeed! Why negotiate? The easiest way to get a significant raise is to change jobs. There is never a better opportunity to negotiate a higher salary than when you are handed a job offer that you have not yet accepted. In addition, two common biases come into play. First impression bias means that people will tend to perceive you as being at the level you start out at, no matter how long you work at a company. By negotiating a better starting salary or title, you're perceived as more competent from the start. In addition, this explains why you're more likely to get a big raise when you change jobs than if you stay in your current job. The other bias is a form of confirmation bias. If you convince someone to pay you more money, they're going to look for reasons why you're worth more money. It's backwards, but because of this the people at the top of the salary range get the largest raises on average. Or, more materially, check out this post from tentawesome after reading this thread: tentawesome posted:I want to thank this thread for getting me a new job with better pay, better benefits, and more PTO. Or, let's put a bit finer point on it and look at exactly what it costs NOT to negotiate, as related by Goodpancakes' colleague: Goodpancakes posted:He called me asking for a reference and that's when I found out he was the other candidate. I asked him what he asked for and he told me 22 an hour. I was totally stunned. I told him then on the phone what they told me. 58-72. At that point he didn't know what they were going to offer him. His negotiation for pay would begin the next day when they officially sent a written offer. Why he didn't ask for more money then I do not know. Maybe he couldn't believe how loving terribly underpaid his previous position was. He trained me at my last position, has a few years more experience, and a certification and I negotiated to be paid more then him when we worked together. Because I was making more then 22 an hour then. BATNA: The Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement Pretty much every post that offers advice in this thread will start talking about the BATNAs involved as Kalenn Istarion got us to coalesce around this useful linguistic concept. Simply put, the BATNA is what will happen if one or both parties walk away from a compromised deal. When you have a good BATNA, you can demand more from the other party. When the other party has a good BATNA, they can demand more from you. All negotiation centers around the BATNAs involved, and it is important to understand that both you and your prospective employer each have a BATNA. A good negotiator is not only contemplating their own BATNA, but is also contemplating the other party's BATNA. As an example, if you have applied to a job at two different companies, and one (let's call them Generous) is offering 10% more than the other (Stingy), then your BATNA with Stingy is to walk away and and take the offer from Generous. This gives you more leverage when negotiating with Stingy; if they walk away and refuse to meet your demands then you have an objectively better alternative! However it also means that you don't have as good a BATNA with Generous, as if they decide to walk away you are immediately left only with the worse opportunity available from Stingy. If you frame your negotiations in terms of BATNA you may not always get exactly what you want, but you'll get close to the best available. THE RULES 1. Never tell a new employer what you are currently making: This information is not relevant to their offer, and it is not relevant to their other options. Employers ask for this information to anchor your expectations around what you are currently making. If an employer is asking for this information, politely decline, and offer instead to talk about what kind of compensation you are looking for from them. If they absolutely insist on you telling them what you used to make, you may want to walk away and find another opportunity. See Tactics below for more discussion about this. 2. Try not to lead in disclosing a target salary: If you can get an offered salary from a prospective employer, instead of offering a salary you would take the job at, then you will often come up with a better outcome. Whoever states a hard and fast number first will anchor the further discussion in the context of that number. If you state a number out the gate, then the employer will either accept that offer, or try to push down from that point. If the employer states a number out the gate, then you will either accept that number, or try to push it higher. Establishing a floor and going up has better outcomes than establishing a ceiling and going down! 3. DO NOT GIVE A SALARY RANGE: A salary range tells an employer three things: You don't know how to negotiate, that you're not holding a firm position, and that you'll accept the bottom of that salary range. What possible value is there in you telling an employer a salary range instead of telling them the number at the top of the range? For the employer it puts a cap on how much they might have to pay you, it tells them that you're volunteering to be bullied down to the bottom of that range, and that you really don't know what you're doing. For you it does nothing good. 4. Try to gracefully move salary negotiation as late in the process as possible: A common thing is for an interviewer to ask for a salary requirement early in the process. This makes little sense from your point of view. For you to give a number, you would need to know the details about the entire package. In bolind's working environment, pension comes on top of the salary, and can be anywhere from 0-20%. Many interviewers request salary demands before granting information about their other tangible benefits, which is just... strange. Discussing a salary out the gate can be a way for an employer to reject you outright, when if they sat down and found out more about you they'd be happy to pay your requested target. If they have a salary number in mind while interviewing, it colors every interaction and evaluation with the question "is this person worth what they are asking?" It is better to have created a compelling case for why you should be hired so that your prospective employer can vividly imagine you being a part of the team, and then attaching a price tag to that reality. 5. Be thoughtful about what information you give the other party: This relates to rule 1 above. Information that you give an employer lets them more comprehensively understand your BATNA, and if that information removes uncertainty to show them that you have a worse BATNA than they might have thought, they'll get more aggressive. Conversely, information that demonstrates you have a better BATNA demonstrates you will be more willing to walk away and go with your BATNA. 6. Know when you've won: It is important to know when you've won. When you set out to negotiate, have a clear goal in mind, and if the other party is willing to meet that goal, then you are probably best served in most cases to agree to the deal then and there. You are taking a certain victory that meets your goal at the outset over risking coming off greedy. (And if you can't stop somewhere and be satisfied, you ARE being greedy!) 7. The best time to find a new job is when you have one you don't already hate: This is self evident if you think about BATNA's, if you hate your current job then literally anything else is possibly better, and it is very hard for you to walk away and keep working at your job you hate. Get ahead of the ball and start looking when things look bad, don't wait for them to look hopeless. 8. Practice makes perfect: A lot of good negotiating comes from confidence and consistency. If you aren't used to talking about money, let alone demanding it forcefully, then it can feel awkward to have a discussion about your future salary. If you negotiate enough eventually you'll get good at it and it will feel natural. The best way to practice is to go on interviews and get to the offer stage. Getting to the offer stage does NOT represent a commitment on your part to accept. But if you do it frequently enough you'll start feeling less awkward an be able to present a smoother and more confident image that WILL help you get what you want! 9: Consider the whole package: You don't want to accept $5k more a year only to find out you get 2 weeks less vacation. This also gets you more room to negotiate, maybe the other party can't or won't come up in salary, but a week more of vacation or a signing bonus or something else is totally appropriate. When you understand your offerer's total position, you can get more of what you want and less of what you don't. 10: At the end of negotiations, if you both accept, get everything in writing: Ideally everything will be presented to you in the form of a written offer letter. If it is, consider the offer to be ONLY the contents of that written offer letter, because that is what your employer will do. If you need adjustments, get a new offer letter that reflects those adjustments! Additionally, some people who are perfectly reasonable to work with and will grant you great opportunities, yet are reluctant to use their written communication skills. If you get something verbally agreed to on the phone, write it down as you're conversing. At the end of the conversation write an email that outlines everything discussed on the call, leading off with something like "Thanks for all your help! Just to confirm what we spoke about on the phone: <your notes go here!>" Make sure to get a response that confirms what you wrote down! Tactics It's easy to have a list of rules, but putting them into practice can be difficult. One of the hardest challenges you will frequently encounter when interviewing for a job is a person who wants your previous salary. In extreme cases you might have to be ready to terminate all interviewing in order to keep this information held close. Whether you fold and grant this information, or get up and walk is up to you, but I will say this: in all of my experiences interviewing I've never met an interviewer who won't flinch and accept you not disclosing your present salary if you stick to your guns. For the interviewers who will happily tank a job application over you not telling them what you currently make, that opportunity might not be that great. bolind adds: bolind posted:Don't tell them your current salary Corben Goble-Garbus provides us the following link for further reading: avoiding discussing current salary. Also it covers other subjects, and, one of the presenters is named Doody.  Can I Negotiate? Lots of posters come to this thread asking if they can negotiate, or if negotiating is worth the risk that an offer gets pulled. Dik Hz has stayed on top of this question admirably, and the best way it's been put is: Dik Hz posted:I have learned the hard way that if anyone ever tries to punish you for negotiating, they are someone that you should not work for. When to Negotiate? Eric the Mauve posted:You’d think it’d be obvious but maybe we should add “Never accept an offer without knowing any numbers” to the thread title. Negotiation is making explicit terms under which a mutually desired outcome is accepted. The terms dictate if the outcome is mutually desirable. If you accept a job offer, or a promotion, or otherwise grant your consent for an outcome over which you are responsible, negotiation is over. If you do this without understanding compensation packages, or raises, or bonuses, then you have told the other party that these things are not important to you. Get all the important details explicitly communicated in writing before you agree to anything. Regarding negotiating internal moves: quote:Hello, I have read through the OP and I have one question. What about when you're interviewing for a different position at the same company? I may have an opportunity to interview for a different position in the same department I currently work. They already know my current pay so that chip is off the table. Ultimate Mango posted:You have zero leverage with your current employer without an offer from someone else. The only way that you could maybe get some leverage is if you're in a big enough company that you could get TWO internal positions competing for you. You will still end up working within HR's pay bands. You will never be able to negotiate as powerfully on an internal position as you will with a different employer: there's no information asymmetry for you to play with in any direction. Depending on where you work, and what other options for employment you have, this may not mean that you end up with a worse outcome, but it will always be with less negotiating power. Lots of people have provided good advice in previous negotiating threads, but it's worth calling out the following goons specifically for their consistently great advice, willingness to help, and contributions to this OP: KYOON GRIFFEY JR, bolind, Jedi Knight Luigi, Chaucer, Dik Hz, MickeyFinn, swenblack, Kalenn Istarion, Boot and Rally, Corben Goble-Garbus, tentawesome, Goodpancakes, and Eric the Mauve Thanks goons! Dwight Eisenhower fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Mar 15, 2016 20:14
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I agree that for most of the people we are advising in this thread, stalwartly attempting not to disclose a target is better than trying to anchor upwards. What would make an individual an exception to that general rule? 1) One has fresh (past 6 months) data indicating that one would be anchoring upward instead of downward. 2) One is ready to accept at the offered number; it would constitute an unambiguous win. 3) One has reasonable suspicion that the anchor number is sufficiently viable to either be accepted or to only get marginal reduction. If all three are true, then yeah, anchor up. I actually just recently accepted a new job which should be significantly better than my old gig, but I had a LOT of dimensions that helped me out. I disclosed a target salary and effectively anchored up. The job involved people who I have worked with in the past. I enjoyed working with all of them, and they all enjoyed working with me. Before even talking about me actually working there, I had precise information about what their compensation packages were as well as if these packages were increases and by what magnitude they were increases. I spent a total of about a half hour interviewing because their CTO wanted to know who I was and what I was about but wasn't evaluating my skillset or other day to day dimensions. Basically every card in the deck was stacked in my favor along the concerns of information asymmetries, fit for the role, and BATNA. If I didn't accept I'd just keep working at my frustrating but entirely adequate and objectively good job. With all of this in mind once we got to the offer stage I said "I'll sign today for $X." and got back an immediate "Done!" This means I almost certainly could have gotten more; and so I was not demonstrating the most aggressive negotiating. But I set up a realistic goal that would be a significant material improvement and knew when I had won, and I also knew I wasn't leaving much on the table considering the compensation of the person who hired me.
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Mar 16, 2016 14:40
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El Mero Mero posted:What are people's opinion about just lying about your current salary (or inflating it) and then using that number to negotiate slightly up from? In addition to what everyone else has said, I think it's just plain cowardly. Why deliberately misinform about your current compensation when asked instead of just saying "No, I know that trap and I'm not going to play along"? If you can't earnestly confront and subdue a problem like someone asking what you currently make, then how are you going to have the backbone to walk away from a bad offer?
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Mar 17, 2016 15:55
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Tots posted:I'm 95% sure I could make a lateral move for ~7k more. Either you have an offer in hand or you're over confident in this belief.
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Mar 22, 2016 14:09
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Tots posted:So for the purposes of addressing the question, assume I have an offer in hand and I'm asking for advice. No. There's actual work to be done in getting a competing offer, and that work has value. I'm not going to participate in your fiction that you get the value without doing the work. The TWO values you get out of doing the work are: 1) You find out information; this information will either confirm or disconfirm your hypothesis that you're worth more than you're presently making. Sometimes when you go out and interview and get offers the result is that everyone offers you approximately what you make right now. This is humbling and it changes your perspective and shows you that you are not in a strong negotiating position. 2) You get leverage. Now when you say "I am worth more, and I think you should pay me more." you can back up that belief with something more than your own sense of self confidence. Your sense of self confidence is not grounded in the reality of a competing offer or market research, so it is worthless apart from however much you can bluster it into. You said yourself that you already expended political capital to get where you are. That means you need for real hard leverage to get any further, which means that you have a competing offer in hand, which means you did the work to go out and interview with other companies to get that offer instead of sitting around making up a number of how confident you are you could get one. So here is my advice: Go out and get other offers if you want to talk about more compensation with your present job.
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Mar 22, 2016 15:56
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Tots posted:I agree with all of that, but you missed the mark of my question by a bit. I've started to do the work to look for other offers sitting at the 6 month mark and I fully expect it to teach me something. It will either teach me that my market value is more or it's not. I know it can go either way, but from the initial leg work that I've done in talking to peers and recruiters, it seems very likely that my market value is indeed higher. My question is then, if my market value is higher by about 5-10k is it worth taking a lateral position purely for cash or should I hold out for cash and title (taking everything in my initial post into consideration)? If this is your first job then odds are you're undercompensated because you were an unknown quantity. Hopping jobs after only about a year in your profession shouldn't be a black mark, but you ought to be ready to hang out wherever you land for a bit if you do make a lateral jump. If you can demonstrate yourself to be well and truly "Grade 3" after only 6 months, then you should target making that leap, and if you can, get an offer for that position in writing around the time that your work is reviewed. You can then make the case to your current manager that you merit a promotion using both the information your firm has as well as that offer letter, and this would be one of those cases where showing some of your hand would be advantageous in terms of giving your manager the leverage to get your promotion. Net: If you can make a significantly appealing, for you, lateral move, then go ahead and use that as a point of leverage. But if it's not the kind of thing you'd be happy coasting at without progress for a year or two, you might want to hold out for a promotion, either internally or by switching firms.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:29
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Nail Rat posted:
If they fail to deliver on what they owe you, accept nothing less, and move on gracefully ASAP. This is what happened to me.
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Mar 22, 2016 20:48
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Uranium 235 posted:I'm not sure how to proceed in my current situation. tl;dr below If you like your employer and you do not feel an immediate sense of urgency to switch jobs and make more money here is how I would play it: Slow down competing offers, ideally you want to get them spread out over time. As you receive competing offers, go to your supervisor and inform him of where you are at very frankly. Tell him that you like where you work, that you want to stay there, but you cannot leave that kind of money on the table. Set expectations about what you want as an outcome: "I know that you cannot get a change effected quickly, probably not in time to be in place before this offer is no longer valid. That's fine, but I want you to match this at my next annual review." Continue to get competing offers. Continue to have this conversation with your supervisor. Continue to provide him material copies of the offers that he can use to argue for why you need a raise and he needs the budget. Hammer at the expectation: Next annual review you match this, or I leave. At annual review, get a raise, or continue to interview, get an offer, and relocate, having done as much as you could to make things work.
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Apr 12, 2016 15:58
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Ezekiel_980 posted:So I followed the advice in the thread and the perspective employer sent me an offer, the offer is the same rate that I make now but I would get extra for shift differential and OT so I'd be making more money regardless, is asking for 10% more base outrageous? No, it's not outrageous. The worst likely outcome is they say "No", and you're where you'd be if you hadn't asked. The worst, unlikely outcome is they pull their offer entirely, and then you are dodging a bullet, because if they pull offers they're also likely broken in other ways that make them intolerable to work with.
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May 4, 2016 14:14
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Deadite posted:I applied to a few internal jobs last month, and I currently have third interviews for two of those jobs scheduled for later this week. My boss is concerned that I may actually leave his team for a new position and has offered me around a 10% bump in salary to stay. This is an interesting question because it gets into one of the underdiscussed costs of working for a big company. When you take your ball and go home to change employers, your previous manager, coworkers, et al basically become irrelevant to your new work. It's still a good idea to not burn bridges and to leave gracefully, because these people can be good contacts later on down the road. But you can be strident and demanding in negotiations with really no effect other than leaving the impression that you're more competent than people who don't negotiate. If you're moving to a different internal job, and you negotiate aggressively then your old manager may still have some influence on your day to day work, can poison the well both to HR and your new manager, and otherwise still exert a non-zero amount of influence. Boston's 30% higher COLA doesn't exactly translate into needing a 30% raise to match a lateral move at a cheaper area of the country, because of the decreasing marginal utility of income. As a trivial example, ordering crap off Amazon will have the same(ish) costs in both locations. In your shoes I'd look at two questions: - Do you like working with your boss well enough that it's an appealing "devil you know"? - What is the proportion of your income that is dedicated to cost of living? That % times 30% reduction is your actual increase in compensatory value by changing locations. E.g. if you spend 30% of your income on rent/fuel/food/etc and the new location has a 30% lower cost of living, then moving saves you 10%, not 30%. In that case, the 10% raise breaks even with the move. Figure out realistically what your actual breakeven point is, then decide accordingly.
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May 10, 2016 15:27
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Gin_Rummy posted:So I just received a job offer, kind of, and was wondering what you guys would suggest I do to get the most out of things. Ask for it. Seriously, figure out what the cost of living difference will be, get them to cover that plus your desired improvement. Ask for the extra week of vacation. Get a quote on independent insurance on an exchange and get that covered by your raise. Ask for these things. If they say no then you're missing out on living in a more expensive area of the country and a potentially free MBA. the talent deficit posted:i took a job at a startup a little over a year ago under the understanding the offer was below market but that i'd be given time for personal research projects and my salary would be adjusted to compensate after our series A You need to leave. There are startups without totally toxic culture, but this isn't one of them. It will never get healthy, you will never be properly compensated, they will never give you that research time, you will never get the headcount you expect. Nothing will get good. Cut your losses now.
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May 13, 2016 21:39
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It's entirely possible they're trying to meet your number but need to up the budget / consult with someone / otherwise cannot execute that decision entirely on their own but still want to make it happen. This is one of those cases where it's quick to deliver a "no" but might take some time to try and wrangle together either a "yes" or a "no, but we can do x", which are both preferable outcomes to a flat out "no". It's frustrating that you have to wait, but it is probably a good sign.
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May 17, 2016 19:39
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Deadite posted:The irony of course is that if I had gone to a competitor then the sky is the limit for negotiating. It is absolutely fine to compete against a competitor, even if that might result in the employee leaving for that competitor. It looks like you exactly understand what your company expects out of you, then. edit: Also Dik Hz is right. If anyone ever tries to bring reprisal for attempting to negotiate cut them off. That's bridge burning material.
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May 18, 2016 13:44
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I'm wondering what people think the liabilities for revealing some information of a competing offer during negotiations are. If you hand them the offer letter they can be lovely and try to tank your alternatives by doing something bizarre with the company issuing the competing offer, but discussing other offers and their compensation packages grounds the discussion in the reality of the labor market.
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May 31, 2016 15:21
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Big City Drinkin posted:I was just offered a job and I asked for 10k over their initial offer, and I ended up with 6k more. I probably would have been too scared to ask/not even thought to ask if it weren't for this thread, so thanks! I encourage you to share your deets on the sheets 
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Jun 13, 2016 15:20
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Aurochs posted:I posted at the end of the last thread regarding negotiating for equity, and ended up with an offer with warrants/stocks as a bonus model. However, after meeting with the CEO I declined because it didn't feel like we would get along You have to decide how much the title is worth. Head of X sounds more impressive than Y Manager, even if the responsibilities are the same. The case for pushing on it: - You interviewed for one thing and were offered something different. - That title could have a long term impact on your earning potential over your career. The case for not pushing on it: - You actual compensation is the same either way. - Complaining about it will be ridiculous if you aren't willing to walk over it. Frankly I'd come down to that last point. If you're ready to tank the negotiation and tell him to get stuffed, then you could use it as a point of leverage, but you better have a solid argument worked out ahead of time and a goal in mind. Something like "Business Development Manager is a less valuable job title for my career than is Head of Strategy. I would not have even interviewed with you if you had been open about this change when soliciting for the position. I want ($X dollars / Y days vacation / Z reports) to compensate."
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Jun 13, 2016 21:02
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. He wanted "someone I can tell to increase conversion rates 5%" which seems more like a scape goat to blame once things goes down the shitter. 
. I called the EVP and asked what was up, and his explanation was that the previous titles were too confusing (what?) and that this is an attempt at streamlining things a bit more. He sees the new position(s) as 2 Business Dev Managers, with 4-5 business developers as reports.
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Bitchkrieg posted:I had a great interview for a digital marketing position at a small local company. I anticipate an offer sometime late this week. I loved the company and it's exactly in the field I want to be in. I also have student loan payments, though, and money is a big deal at this point. Yes that's all reasonable to negotiate for. Are you actually willing to walk on the offer if they won't give you the additional day and the better title?
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Jun 14, 2016 14:53
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Gin_Rummy posted:Well, after the longest offer negotiation ever (seriously, does it always take three weeks from the verbal offer to finalize the details?), I have decided to turn down the job. Their salary offer was well below my minimum and they didn't even attempt to meet me in the middle from my initial ludicrous salary "expectation," nor would they budge on any of the benefits or perks. Pretty disappointing, overall. I'd reply that their offer was not satisfactory and that they demonstrated they would not adjust it to make it satisfactory. If they continue to be curious then you can start to enumerate all the things they wouldn't budge. Believe it or not the people with whom you are dealing might never have been involved in hiring someone with a backbone before and so used to getting their way that they're honestly flummoxed that anyone would turn them down or demand them to actually change their offer. While continuing to participate in the conversation gains you nothing in this exact circumstance, it will help the next person who has a backbone, and costs you nearly nothing to do.
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Jun 15, 2016 17:07
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Bitchkrieg posted:They couldn't meet my (seriously 100% reasonable) salary requirement, so no job for me. The founder was a good guy, though, and recommended other local companies, praised my education/knowledge, and asked to keep in touch. Good to stick to your guns, and good luck!
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Jun 16, 2016 01:20
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Fireside Nut posted:Firstly, thank you thread. You have been an absolutely invaluable resource. There's less discussion about internal offers for a few reasons, let's talk about how it differs from negotiating multiple offers from different companies: - The two parties you're negotiating with know each other, are able to easily contact each other, and there's less information asymmetry. - While you can play them off each other to some extent, ultimately they're both still going to be limited by the same accounting department. - You have less leverage as they can impact your day to day life after you take your ball and go home. This is where a lot of political maneuvering and turf battles derive from; because there's less room for naked aggression you get more passive aggressive behavior. To wit: I'd get an offer from the new department, take it back to your current director for a counter offer, and then play that where it will go. I would deliberately avoid setting a goal with the new department that they could meet, because if they meet it and you then proceed to juice it with a competing offer from your current department, you're demonstrating that meeting your demands will not satisfy you. I'd only play one round of this back and forth, because past that you run the risk of uniting the two directors against you instead of playing them off each other. Basically internal offers are a more nuanced, riskier game to play. The culture of where you work will dictate a lot of what you can and cannot do, and you know more about that than anyone posting in this thread does. (Probably)
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Jun 30, 2016 14:19
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Fireside Nut posted:Quick follow-up to my internal negotiation situation: In general I think we collectively avoid advising people to negotiate in bad faith. If you make demands of your current department, and they meet those demands, would you stay? That's all this conversation should come down to, because any answer other than 'yes', means that you are setting goals and then not following through when they are met. It sounds like you're ready to go and you're just trying to get more leverage. Nothing wrong with that, but stay clean and respectable in the process. If you set a goal and your current department head meets it with a counter offer and you don't take it, do you think the consequences end there? You chose a low leverage move, don't overplay your hand.
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Jul 8, 2016 15:22
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Indolent Bastard posted:I only just found this thread. If the job I am (hopefully) being offered soon has a salary range of $xx,xxx and $zz,zzz and I'd be ok with the mid-range of $yy,yyy how hard should I swing for the fences? I don't want to say Z when I'd take Y, but I don't want to leave money on the table either. As we're fond of saying, if you're punished for negotiating, you didn't want to work there anyway.
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Jul 11, 2016 19:22
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I disagree, under no circumstances should you accept additional responsibilities without additional compensation. A promise for a raise in 6 months is worth nothing, they will play the same game again when 6 months roll around until you grow a spine and put your foot down. The ONLY way that it's a good move is if you can make yourself irreplaceable in your new double-position AND have the ability to walk for appropriate compensation after 6 months. If you do this you'll probably be occupying the double-position indefinitely so you have to make the compensation worth it over the long haul. Get a good deal now, or don't go forward with them.
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Jul 23, 2016 23:12
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Yes. Run, don't walk to a new employer
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Jul 27, 2016 20:05
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Bitchkrieg posted:Hi negotiation thread. I need help negotiating an immediate exit due to ongoing sexual harassment. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose, and pretty much no leverage to achieve anything unless you are willing to lawyer up. Some rear end in a top hat might say it's not appropriate to this thread but a lot of what we talk about is job switching so here's my advice, having never had to deal with the terrible situation your soon to be ex-boss put you in: Submit a resignation letter in writing. Keep it Nixonian: "To <Direct Manager>, Effective today, July 29th of 2016, I resign my position as <your job title>. <Signature> Bitchkrieg" Have hard copy of this on your person. Say literally nothing else. Putting anything else in writing cannot help you. Have a hard copy of your google doc on your person. If that GDoc is associated with a work account get it moved to a personal account ASAP. Do all of this before you let on to anyone that you're leaving. Hand letter to your boss, be prepared to be escorted from the building. Refuse to discuss your reasons with him. Tell him you'll discuss why you're leaving with no notice with HR. If and when you get debriefed by HR keep your position professional and impersonal: - You are leaving without notice because your direct manager has created a hostile work environment. - You have a dated record of a pattern of behavior of examples of his sexual harassment over the past 5 months. - Your expectations are that you will receive good references from this company in the future despite leaving with no notice, in consideration of your boss's wildly inappropriate behavior. IF they ask for the record you have a hardcopy on your person to provide them with. It is not the only copy of that document. IF they assent get that agreement in writing. IF they do not assent, become hostile, or otherwise adopt any position other than "Oh gently caress we can get our pants sued off! We'll agree to your reasonable demand!" then you probably want to leave and lawyer up. Stay cool and professional, focus on this being the end of your relationship with this dysfunctional organization and that you have a new opportunity to work in a healthy place where you won't have terrible people doing and saying terrible things to you. Don't worry about arguing with them, about if your leaving is justified, or too much about them serving as a good reference for you. If they aren't cooperative, disengage and lawyer up. edit: I strongly disagree with asur, do not stay around in a hostile environment any longer just to try and CYA legally. There is no reason for you to continue to be subjected to the abuse, and your own mental well being and health are the most important things. Dwight Eisenhower fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Jul 29, 2016 |
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Jul 29, 2016 15:51
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Bitchkrieg posted:Update: Everything went better than anticipated. Congratulations on your new job. It sounds like your ex-manager represents only himself and not your former employer. You executed extremely well and had a good plan, and now you've got a good reference without your ex-boss. It's entirely probable he'll be fired or otherwise suffer some negative consequence, and will not internalize responsibility for that consequence. You've got a good head on your shoulders and can take care of yourself. Be safe and thoughtful.
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Jul 30, 2016 23:13
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Yeah so a couple things: In GENERAL a transition from contract to full time will lead to a reduction in hourly compensation. Part of the premium of a contract worker is that there's no mutual expectation of a continued relationship and so the hourly rate is higher to account for that risk factor. By getting into a W-2 relationship with the intermediary party instead of 1099 with the people you worked directly with, that intermediary got a cut and so the money out the company's pocket was higher than what you were paid hourly. In exchange for this the clients got some coverage on liability, access to a labor pool, and a few other things. But this rule is not set in stone. You're a known quantity and their only support engineer. Bonuses are worthless, because they can not happen. Never include a bonus in your compensation package calculations. So yeah, you've emptied the magazine into your foot. Can it be saved? Well things can go better, but you need to up your game. If you do not up your game, you will not get better compensation, and there's noone around you can blame for that but yourself. Company equity is only a valuable form of compensation if you have some sort of liquidity mechanism available. If the company is publicly traded then that's easy, you can sell shares as they vest (for a total of $30k over 4 years, or $7.5k year). If it's privately held you'll have to find a purchaser to buy them if you want to get any money out of those shares, and that can be difficult. I've gotten option grants and passed up on executing them because there was no liquidity for getting that money back out. When transitioning from contract to full time, the amount of negotiating room you have is the same as it is everywhere else: what is your BATNA? If you can get another job at or near what you're making now doing support for some other company you can tell these guys to pound sand. If the $45k cut is still $10k better than you'll get anywhere else, then you don't have a better option. YOU need to do the work to find out what your other alternatives are. That might mean contacting other employers and seeing what they'll offer you for your skills. That might mean going to your W--2 employer and seeing if they have any other work with other clients. You're talented enough to get a full time offer this time, you may very well get another such offer with another employer, and in the future you can not gently caress up the negotiating. Finally you can try and play games and tell stories but at the end of the day you have two moves: accepting the pay cut and getting full time with the devil you know, or walking and maintaining your compensation with an unknown environment. You can also prepare to walk, get a written offer, and take it back to your current clients for negotiating leverage for why you shouldn't take a pay cut. You've got some work to do, and you've made it substantial by what you have done incorrectly already. Time to focus and execute.
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Aug 2, 2016 19:32
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Dude it's right in the title: OFF THE RANGE Don't give ranges, give goals. If you want 130k ask for 130k. If you think that's so ambitious that they'll balk, figure out what you want and ask for that. If you don't know what you want, don't negotiate.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:40
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solauran posted:Ok thanks will adjust accordingly. Don't start off stating a compromised position, because then during the course of negotiation you will not demonstrate to the other person that you are compromising what you want. Additionally, you'll have ceded to their position out of the gate without demonstrating that you've given anything. People think that you're asking for what you want the first time out the gate, regardless if it was a compromise from what you really wanted or not. So if you want $130k, ask for $130k. The ONLY time you should be tuning down what you are asking for is if you can confidently predict that you won't have another similar opportunity and can't afford to have them balk and walk away from negotiations entirely.
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Aug 10, 2016 18:41
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solauran posted:Thanks for the the advice all You got the 10k / year and some valuable experience. Experience is what you get, when you didn't get what you wanted. If you internalize the opportunities for improvement and execute on them real next time around you will likely do even better on your next round of the negotiating game. And even with the opportunities you missed, $10k is nothing to sneeze at! If you're comfortable documenting your experiences, we've compiled a record of what simply asking can get here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nSJHNBoljONE0lu4Yi_a5JUOzv3cS5FbC6m8lxT9i3E/edit#gid=245510761
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Aug 19, 2016 15:16
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I agree, that article is crap. Negotiation is a game, it's an adversarial zero sum game. You can collaborate with people who you have previously been adversarial with, it's pretty much a necessity of being a successful adult. There are limits to the game, there are losing aggressive moves, and you can be a better negotiator than you are at your nominal job responsibilities. The most onerous part though: people looking for advice in negotiating are probably sufficiently unfamiliar to be underpaid, which means that their expectations are probably sufficiently low that they will anchor the discussion low. Pretty much everyone who is just starting off at negotiating and getting their feet wet will do better to stay tight lipped about their current expectations and their current salary and force an employer to disclose a number first. While a person who is confident and well compensated might do well with an opening demand, it's not advice that anyone can pick up and succeed with. Dwight Eisenhower fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 22:09
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rizuhbull posted:Thanks for the responses to my questions last page. Wanted to chime back in and say we agreed on a $1 raise. Was fairly painless, but more importantly, the experience of asking makes asking again in the future that much easier. I told a friend of mine and she said she's never asked. I was a bit shocked. I've also read however that women are less likely to ask for raises and that accounts for some of the reason why women are generally paid less for the same job. Obama signed link related a few years ago to combat this. But it got me thinking, what does this thread think of the taboo of not discussing wages with coworkers? Justified? None of anyone's business? A form of control? Meant to keep workers ignorant? At my old job there was a management effort to keep people from discussing salaries, as well as to keep people from providing feedback directly to each other. Neither of these were healthy. It also didn't work. People who left often had salary discussions with peers on their way out the door about both what they made and what they would be making. It spread to employees having discussions about compensation prior to leaving, which then lead to numerous people, including me, leaving. Discussing wages is one of the ways that workers find out they're getting stiffed. It can cause its own share of problems but keeps management honest. The reason its discouraged is because nearly all of the negative consequences of not discussing wages fall on rank and file employees.
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Aug 30, 2016 13:46
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CarForumPoster posted:vague innuendo about leaving for other intracompany opportunities actually works I'll post up. This almost certainly won't work. If you don't have the courage to actually come right out and say you'll leave for a better opportunity in the same company, why should I believe you'll actually have the courage to go ahead and do it?
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Sep 14, 2016 13:46
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CarForumPoster posted:There's a lot of movement in my company right now, I think everyone knows if someone offers me a level higher technical position I am gone. There's no question of my courageousness. Great, your negotiating position is strong and you have good alternative opportunities. And since you are so courageous, you can confidently go in and say that you expect to receive a promotion plan, with Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Timely goals. You will execute on that plan and you will get promoted, or you will make an internal move to another team. No need for vague innuendo. Using vague innuendo is the employee equivalent bad communication to the vague, bad communication about what you need to do to get promoted you are receiving from your manager.
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Sep 15, 2016 15:14
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Blinky2099 posted:The real comparison should be "go get an offer from another company since youre so young and you can probably get a 20-30% raise" but I'm not super interested in moving yet You're allowed to turn down offers for literally no reason. You're allowed to interview literally just to get the number and then walk out of the interviewing process entirely. If you want to dip a toe in the water to see if your raise is keeping acceptable pace with your value on the open market and then sit fat and happy where you are, that's a totally okay thing to do.
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Sep 28, 2016 15:50
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MickeyFinn posted:Current hiring practices include taking advantage of information asymmetry to reduce labor costs (read: pay people less). If the places you interview at were interested in skipping a few interviews they have alternatives, like posting the salary offer in the job posting. Don't worry about they company, they are getting what they want out of the process. Just want to reinforce this. People play the game they want; if they don't disclose salary up front they want to play the negotiation game. Do you think there's a reason that most workers' wages have stagnated or not kept pace with inflation while a privileged few are making bank? If you go out with a great BATNA and talk to other companies then you can play the negotiation game hard. You can also screw up really badly and not regret it. By not disclosing a salary up front they're signing on for losing great candidates because their numbers aren't great. You might also end up finding out that by making what you feel are unrealistic asks, you can get way more than you think you should.
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Sep 29, 2016 17:34
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Kalenn Istarion posted:Unions raise the ability of workers as a group to extract more value but they stifle opportunities for individuals who outperform. I could layer on anecdotes about how people I know from my hometown were 'encouraged' by more senior workers in the union to not work so hard so as not to make the bottom feeders look bad. This runs the risk of turning into a political debate; but I'm going to try and steer it away from there. People with differentiable skill sets AND who possess good negotiating skills will likely come out ahead of collective bargaining, however if either of those aren't true, then there's a good chance that they'll do better with a union, depending on the union. Without a real differentiable skill set, it's hard for any employee to hold their labor from an employer effectively, the employer's BATNA is to find someone else providing similar-enough labor for a lower price. Without good negotiating skills, we see, well, the kinds of outcomes that people have before they read this thread. There's an academic argument that people should be able to focus on excelling at their chosen vocation without having to also develop good negotiating skills. While that argument's diametrically opposed to reality, I do appreciated the sentiment behind it. Basically, some of the inefficiencies of unions suck, but if the total increase in pay from good negotiating outweighs the union dues the members are ahead anyway.
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Oct 3, 2016 14:49
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Slimchandi posted:How do I balance Never Not Negotiate with Know When You've Won? "Never Not Negotiate" is encouraging you to think about your goals, and to drive outcomes toward your goals. That doesn't mean you get absolutely all the things you want, it just means, don't sit down and take what you can get without pushing some. If your goal is to make £28k, then you should pursue it by talking to your potential employers. You're absolutely correct that it is in some tension with "Know When You've Won", and so like any other two principles in tension you have to find a balancing act. We call out these two principles so that you can think about what happens when you swing too hard one way or the other without finding balance. Know When You've Won means you need to think about your goals in specific terms, and to stop negotiating when you get them. "I want to make as much money as possible" is not a specific goal, because you can't provably achieve it. If in pursuit of it you secure some salary, maybe you could have gotten more? If in pursuit of it, you negotiate yourself out of a job, then maybe you've exceeded how much you can make? Or maybe your negotiating just sucks. It's not a crisp goal. "I want to make £30k" is a specific goal. Either you're doing it, or you're not. If someone agrees to your specific goal, then it's time for you to make good on your end of negotiations and come to an agreement. Maybe they'd be willing to stomach 32k, but your goal was 30k. It's time to play ball! Having specific goals from the outset lets you focus on an outcome that is realistic, and it creates an environment where you can win and stop pushing. When you achieve your goal, your behavior signals to your counterparty that your goal is achieved and they know what they're getting into. They can likewise relax and stop pushing back. If you don't have an achievable goal, then there's a constant tension in the background, and noone, neither you nor your counterparty know where it stops. Make sense? Slimchandi posted:Would £28k be a reasonable counter? I think that's reasonable to ask about. The worst reasonable outcome is they say "No, 25k." and you've lost nothing. The worst unreasonable outcome is they say "No, we're pulling our offer entirely.", in which case they're punishing you for negotiating, in which case they're insufferable dicks who would have been miserable to work with anyway.
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Oct 4, 2016 14:05
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Is 26k a reasonable number overall? You mention consulting and maybe because I'm a mgt/strat guy I think differently, but our fresh-out-of-school kids with a BA make 60 + bonus. He's talking wacky dreary islander money, not Murican Dollars.
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Oct 4, 2016 16:39
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Slimchandi posted:Where our healthcare is also free... Please update https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nSJHNBoljONE0lu4Yi_a5JUOzv3cS5FbC6m8lxT9i3E/edit#gid=245510761 with your details if you are comfortable sharing. 
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Oct 4, 2016 17:57
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