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Re:What to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number by komali2 on Sunday August 19, 2018 @03:16PM (#17795721)
On reverse car salesman - use this on the company you know for sure you want. Likely the company you know for sure you want will remain that company even within a 10k range price difference (speaking to software engineers here). That being said, you can start throwing all sorts of weird shit on the table, if you've already negotiated your salary up. PTO is usually the first thing that comes to mind, but I've also seen "guaranteed right to wear flip flops in the office, forever, no matter what office dress code becomes" put in a very picky qa engineer's contract (which is funny because he showed up to his onsite in a suit and tie... And I haven't seen him in anything but flip flops since). There's a hardware laboratory here so I got "access to laboratory" put in my contract, and since then I've learned to solder by just hanging around in there. Remote work stuff comes to mind, maybe some sort of time-bound access to powerful servers, just see what you can think of.

Reason being, if the company has to give just one more thing to nab you, they'll feel like they really worked hard to secure the perfect candidate, there'll be no doubt in their mind, the recruiter/decision maker will always tell the story about how you were looking at other offers "but we finally secured her by putting the Foosball table right into her contract." And on the other side of it, you get that warm fuzzy feeling that you negotiated all there was to negotiate.

Re:What to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number by oldManRiver on Sunday August 19, 2018 @04:22PM (#17795978)
I negotiated flex time at my current job, as I have for every job since 1999.

After 6 weeks they told me I couldn't have flex time anymore but wouldn't give me the pay cut I took to get it. So now I leave early every day at different times and "work" from home once a week.

I haven't done any real work for them in over a year and a half because of the flex time fiasco. I keep waiting for them to fire me but I'm friends with my boss so he's protecting my job, which is hilarious, but that's how shitty this company is.

Re:What to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number by chiph on Sunday August 19, 2018 @06:21PM (#17796504)
Another thing to add would be car allowance. Which still counts as income, according to the IRS, but perhaps comes out of a different line-item in the company budget, and thus allows them to "make their salary budget numbers"

Or even a company-provided car/transport. The last place where I worked many employees drove a company-owned car - every three years the firm would lease a new one for them to drive.

Re:What to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number by vmlinuz on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @05:12AM (#17808152)
I did this, back in the depths of history... Changed job involuntarily in early 2000, had verbally accepted an offer from one company, another company came along and said they couldn't offer me any more 'salary', but they could include a car/allowance - which meant quite a lot more cash since I already had a car.