Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate?
Every comp negotiation I've ever had with a company has gone kind of like this:
[Company]: Here's your offer for $X.
[Me]: I'd like $Y.
[Company]: Your offer is for $X.
[Me]: Well, I think I bring skill A, B, and C to the table, and here is some data showing someone with my experience tends to make $Y.
[Company]: We don't care. Your offer is for $X. Are you interested or not?
[Me]: How about vacation time or benefits? Or maybe salary vs. equity? Can these be adjusted?
[Company]: <yawn> if you don't want $X, there's the door. We have 35 other candidates in the hiring pipeline.
The less crass answer: In almost every company, you’re being hired on a salary band, so unless you’re at the top of that band in the initial offer there is room to go up, so you can typically push a bit higher. The trick is to make a request that’s higher than what they initially offer but not so high that they outright reject it without additional conversation, and if they are play hardball, and don’t budge on anything, you just reject their offer. It does mean you have to be comfortable rejecting an otherwise decent or good offer, but presumably most companies are willing to negotiate with a good candidate so this shouldn’t be a problem in practice if the negotiation is done in a considered way.
As mentioned upthread in another comment: all the negotiation advice boils down to "start looking for a job while you have a job". Nobody is ever giving good advice how to get a good salary when your arse is on the wall (i.e. you have no option but to find a job in the next 2-3 months).
If they know you have alternatives, they are much more likely to negotiate. In fact the modern version of this guide is try to get several offers and negotiate them against each other (not you versus the company). Might be more difficult in the current market.
That said, I've found the "competing offer" element to be of little to no value. Even when I had 7 competing offers, not one of them negotiated more than maybe 10% on the amount. The one that gave me the largest bump didn't even need to know about competing offers - they just wanted to know what would get me to sign. I said X and they did it.
Thank you, glad to see not everyone in this thread is a super-rich SV engineer that never had to even lift a finger to get the next job.
Depends on the company. If you were applying where I work and tried to use a competing offer to get a better offer, they'd just suggest you go with the other offer.
Wish more people on HN worked at least 5 years outside the USA. It would give them valuable insights.
In that case you could still work for that company, but would your company offer a higher salary with any other negotiating strategy?
This kind of requires companies winning above and beyond anybody else. Those are rare.
Every where else, its work as usual and people as usual. Nobody is important. People join and leave all the time. They could care less about whatever other offers you have.
> [Me]: I’d like $Y
You could try:
> [Me]: That matches my base salary at the moment but my current employer gives me healthcare and a car allowance so I would be out of pocket if I moved from my current job. In addition I currently am eligible for a 10% bonus. Would you consider an additional $5k/yr to cover some of this? I would love to move… although I can’t justify a pay cut, but think this is a really good opportunity and would love to work with you so hope we can make something work.
Ie you gotta give them a reason to justify paying you more, and to think that paying more is required for you taking the job. Also you have to be realistic in how much you ask (smaller amounts are more likely to be accepted, larger amounts pay more but are more likely to be rejected outright as if something is too large you can’t really counteroffer)
Of course people can say no to things, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask when there is a good probability that they would say yes (particularly if you ask for the right amount in the right way) and very little downside.
The employers BATNA is they go to the pool of 35 other candidates. Yours is you go back to your job.
If your job hunting first when your sick to death of your job, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
If this is your only offer, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
If you’re one paycheck away from being out of the street, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
See where I’m going with this?
I think a better way to phrase your critique would be: "acronyms harm the flow of your text - they're best used sparingly"
Friendly tends to be called ‘charity’
BATNA (and I am every familiar with the term, as I’ve had to do a significant amount of negotiation) is the ‘plan B’ if there is no acceptable ‘good’ agreement.
If someone has no acceptable BATNA, their negotiation is essentially ‘please don’t beat me up too bad’, not ‘let’s see if we can agree on something that works for both of us’. No BATNA means you aren’t effectively negotiating, just begging to not be abused too badly.
Sometimes an employer doesn’t have a BATNA option, but that is rare. Usually it’s the employee which doesn’t have a plan B.
A BATNA when doing negotiations over salary, for instance, might be taking another offer with an otherwise less desirable company. Or continuing a job search for more time. Or becoming a sugar baby for an older woman somewhere, etc. or filing for bankruptcy.
Knowing what your own (and what the other sides) plan B is, is important to actually have a successful negotiation, because when your offer starts to look less desirable than their plan B, it isn’t going to go well.
In seemingly all situations, a decision maker is considering their most preferred alternatives rather than their least preferred alternatives.
That's what 99.9% of all negotiation advice I ever saw boils down to. Basically beat the game before it beats you.
Really cute... until you remember most people don't live to "play the negotiation game". They want a stable paycheck and to raise their family.
But who's asking, right.
I read the Wikipedia page, but I’m still unclear what information I gain from BATNA over just “best alternative” or “second best option/choice”.
'Alternative' or 'option', leave the question 'to what?'.
I declined this job offer because I had BATNA.
I declined this job offer because I had a better option.
I negotiated more PTO because I had a BATNA.
I negotiated more PTO because I had a better alternative.
I think you're being a pendent.
Oh god help me....
(But a little disappointed my trap wasn't successful ..)
Recruiter: The offer is $100k.
Me: I want 120k and WFH.
Recruiter: I checked with the manager. The best we can do is either 120k but you show up every day or 90k remote.
Me: I'm already paid 110k and work remote. Sorry.
Recruiter: Oh, alright. We can't afford that. We'll continue our search with other candidates. Thanks for your time.
Both "options" presented by the recruiter are "alternatives" and they're both "negotiated agreements" (i.e. a meeting in the middle).
BATNA is short for what you get when negotiations fail and you walk away with no deal. (In this case, staying at the 110k remote job is one party's, the other party's is to keep interviewing more candidates.)
I had once had this aversion to neologisms for the sake of them too. Then I took some math classes and understood that saying "ring" is better than saying "commutative group with multiplication satisfying the following axioms...". Ultimately, it's helpful to invoke words that a group of people commonly understands, even if it seems to the uninitiated that it's saying nothing of importance.
The word "BATNA" is used a lot in discussions on negotiations. These books are full of tips on thinking about/finding out your counterpart's BATNA, coming to the negotiation table with a strong BATNA, conveying your BATNA to the other person, etc. In this context, the word/acronym conveys a very specific meaning that unspecialized English words like "option" and "alternative" don't capture.
Just trying to be helpful :)
If you are unemployed and this is your first offer in 3 months you cant really negotiate... just take it if it is a reasonable offer.
No. Could you elaborate?
In your example one is not, so negotiations aren't possible.
“Negotiate from a position of strength” is evergreen advice.
So I'd call their bluff. When they ask if you want the lower offer, say no. I can tell you that most places have recruiters being told to get you in the door for as little as possible... but still to get you in the door.
That's partly bluff. Hiring a good candidate is costly.
If they make you an offer, they have already sunk the costs of screening you. Having you exit at the negotiation stage is never free for them. You always have some wiggle room.
So they are shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly but why do you care, you still didn't get hired.
Therefore, any offer should be backed by logic of the form "we want to hire this candidate for $Y or less. We will make an initial of $X (X < Y), so that we have room to negotiate upwards when they ask."
In my experience, usually Y==(X * 1.1).
2. Ask for more money and/or more shares (if you think the shares are any good).
That said, people in this position should cite how sweet that pot needs to be upfront instead of after the fact. But that doesn't always happen.
People always talk about competing offers, but your negotiating power will never be higher than when you literally don't care if you get an offer or not. If I'm perfectly content in my current gig, the only way I'm leaving is for a *serious* upgrade. And it's no skin off my teeth if I walk away from a bad deal.
Sometimes you're desperate for a job and they have you over a barrel, but there's no reason they need to know that.
Also, as a hiring manager, the one way people found themselves with me saying "That's great, go screw" was when it was clear they were playing us comp-wise by lowballing us to get their foot in the door & then raising the bar once the offer came. That's deceptive, and a character flaw I don't want to deal with in an employee.
Now if you mean keep your cards close to the vest and don't reveal your number until after they give theirs, then I agree. That's good negotiating tactics. But it's not always possible. And now we're back to who is in direr straights: is the candidate willing to walk away if the company demands a number & they don't want to give one? Is the company willing to lose a candidate in this situation? Whomever blinks first wins the day on this one.
Sounds like low skill, or entry-level work. or nah?
You can play hardball or softball. Hardball works when you have competing offers, and risks your offer being pulled.
Alternatively, you can just ask nicely. I've had luck saying something akin to "hey I'm super excited to join BigCo. I'm just curious, is there any way to move up the comp at all? Just checking, I don't know what the bands are, but if you can come up some, that'd be great. Either way, let me know I don't want to hold anything up, I'm excited to start".
Guess what? Sometimes the hiring manager has the power to come up 5,10,15k if you just ask. I've had luck and other times I've been told "nope" but i've never had anyone be upset.
This is almost never a real risk. At worst they will say they can’t budge on price and you need to decide within some deadline (which is also somewhat of a bluff).
The last company's letter would be:
[Company]: We have decided to move forward with another candidate. Thank you for your time and good luck on your search!
Apparently they are secret.
They're trying to get your help in decreasing their tax burden, without explicitly saying that that's what they're doing.
(Dunno why people are so coy about this; tax minimization is not illegal, and companies are totally willing to work with you on it.)
Just tell me what you want, and let me as SME figure out how to get you there.
When you're in a high-enough tax bracket (in taxation regimes where such high tax-brackets exist), adding a marginal dollar to your net income becomes impractically expensive for the company, compared to basically anything else the company could offer you.
For some people, in some places, getting an extra $20k/yr tacked onto your net income, would cost your employer more than just, say, hiring you a well-paid full-time personal assistant, with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
Googling "personal assistant salary", it looks like the average in the US is ~$50k/year. So a personal assistant would cost more, but it is in the right ballpark where that could be a better choice than that raise if this is the reason for the raise:
> with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
Nobody negotiates net. It's not even practical. Your tax situation will depend of the other revenues you might receive on top of your wages and the deductions you are eligible to and your employer doesn't have to know about that.
Which is to say, if you're making USD$100k/yr working for Ericsson in Sweden (where you're in the highest, 52.9%, tax bracket for any marginal income above USD$83k), they're gonna be thinking differently about how to reward you as a high performer, vs if you were making USD$100k/yr at Google in the US (where that salary would instead just have you scraping the top of the 22% tax bracket.)
Google would almost certainly just give you more money — and would likely continue to do that indefinitely, as even the highest US federal tax bracket (37% at USD$600k/yr) isn't too onerous. Ericsson, on the other hand, might already rather offer you something non-monetary and "cheap" for them (e.g. a company car), rather than biting the bullet on a "substantial, productivity-incentivizing" raise (i.e. one that meaningfully increases your net income.)
And that is why precisely why salaries tend to be lower in many European countries (that have these high tax brackets); and why everyone in those countries instead expects / demands / enshrines requirements in law for tons of non-monetary benefits, like long vacations! "Purely salary" and "salary levels off, then tons of non-material benefits" are both Nash equilibria in compensation space; just very different ones.
To begin with, non monetary benefits have to be declared in most European countries and impact your tax rates and are taxed the same way than giving you more money so your whole dodgy reasoning immediately falls apart.
Patrick's guide explicitly talks about how a lot of people don't want to negotiate. His argument is that if doing something distasteful for a short period of time will get you a significant salary boost, you should try to do it anyway.
Ultimately, if it's distressing to someone to be assertive and negotiate, my first reaction isnt "That's fine! Let's all work together to make things nice and easy for them!" My reaction is "It's sad that it's so distressing, but one way or another they need this important life skill. Let's help them acquire it, even if it's difficult."
Everything is negotiable. Some things are just easier than others. Besides, did you tell them up front what was negotiable, or did you just kinda expect them to figure it out?
Here is the thing - the company would have zero difficulty with me asking for a $100/day per diem while traveling for months on end, instead of doing expenses - that was negotiable. But there was absolutely zero chance of getting a $7 bag of cough-drops allowed as a medical-expense. Non-negotiable.
(The thing is - when doing expense reports - it usually was pretty random which line-item you grabbed for some things - there were two or three categories that might make sense. Not so with that medical line item).
Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.
But how are we supposed to know what is negotiable? HRs main negotiation tactic is to say “not negotiable”
Maybe HN should mandate comments in these threads to be prefixed with:
"[USA resident that never struggled to find a job]"
How do you think? I think it will help not skew the discussions so severely in the direction of privileged SV engineers.
Truth is, most of the programmers out there face terrible HRs and the deal is binary -- you either accept all of it (with very rare exceptions with super small wiggle rooms) or just go look for a job elsewhere.
But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. They know it’s something you’re supposed to do, but they will try and negotiate things that are not negotiable (like making it a hard ask for extra contributions per paycheck for healthcare to match their former employer, rather than just ask for more money to cover the difference) or they’ll make demands for things we already offer if they had just paid attention and read the benefits packet we emailed them, and it takes a bunch of back and forth to figure out what they’re asking for (nothing, in the end). Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable. (We’ll change a lot actually in negotiations, but not everything)