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.

I’m hardly a “Captain”, and I’ve successfully negotiated salary increases several times.

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.

I actually strongly disagree with this take and

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

You indeed have little to no leverage if you don't have a better offer elsewhere.

Was true in 2012, remains true today.

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 people who can negotiate, especially when changing jobs, are almost always the ones who can get multiple offers.

i'm usually lucky if i can get one offer when interviewing. no room to negotiate that way...

I didn't try to negotiate my first job (I was just happy to be employed, especially at AWS)

My two jobs since I've been able to get more by... just asking for more, even without competing offers.

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 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.

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."

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.

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.

In my experience the only thing that works is competing offers.

If you say a number, even 1.5x you've already lost. Replying with either yes (accept) or no are the only two responses that work.

I think expectations are often realistic in the sense that companies are generally able to hire sufficiently many people at acceptable prices. But I think it’s also the case that there are fashions in interviewing such that companies are mostly all trying to hire the same subset of candidates that do well at the current thing. So if you’re bad at the current style of interviewing it’s going to be more work than someone fortunate enough to do well at the current fad.

So even if you’re just advancing down a flow chart, the ‘negotiation’ option is better, right?

If you have ~5+ years of experience and live in the US, things haven't changed. Regardless, negotiating matters more than ever.

At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.

> Reality is that engineers have way less bargaining power that they used to

There is negotation power but only if you pass all the interview challenges. Only at that point you are in a position to name your number (of course you won't ask $500K when you know the company you are applying to pays around $200K... because you have done your previous research on that; you'll ask something between $200K and $250K and see how they react). Layoffs and AI hasn't change this (sure, thing, 5 years ago companies were hiring more and perhaps were more relaxed about this, but that didn't change the fact that you can only negotiate when they want you)

that's because it was written in 2012! The original essay is here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ (Originally written: January 23, 2012)

Honestly at work LLMs seemed to make me less productive. For side projects they help but I've seen papers indicating this is the case for industry.

We as engineers have let the recruiters and VC funding brainwash us into lower salaries. Kind of looking forward to a rebound.

Tangential: What's with the disclaimer about reading on an "iDevice"? Do they struggle with lots of words on a single page?

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.

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.

Ok, but also engineers in the US are much better paid now than 15 years ago. In 2010 the big story in engineer comp was that Google, Apple, and others were conspiring to avoid competing for talent (and thereby driving pay up) [1]. It was roughly Facebook not being part of this scheme that started driving salaries up. A few years ago the popular story was that people were switching jobs because their compensation had been inflated by massive share price increases (ie you are promised x shares vesting over 4 years at sign on with refresher grants, but the value of x shares goes up a bunch over those years) and they wanted to maintain their high realised comp even though shares were no longer rising as much. The only way for that to happen was engineers getting paid very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

It still is! I think getting your foot in the door is much more difficult now compared to 5-6 years ago, similar to difficulty finding entry level work in 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.

Let's assume the amount is fixed. One approach is to ask to re-frame the position to be better value.

Ask for working hours that effectively pays you more per day, like an 80% contract at the same comp. If they mumble HR and hours, offer to do 4x10 hour days. The magic phrase in corporate is "flexible working". This doesn't solve your comp going up, but you get a 3-day weekend and 52 more holidays a year.

This one even works at intensely bureaucratic organisations like universities. With grants, the amount you can be paid is very fixed, but almost anything else can be approved if three people sign off on it.

If there's a single fixed number (rather than a range), there's probably a reason for that (might be a government, university, or institute role with a fixed pay schedule, for example) and as a hiring manager, I'm assuming you're applying for the job as published, including the comp number.