High Salaries Haunt Some Job Hunters
wsj.com"Time and again, he says, employers seem to lose interest after he answers a question that they ask early on: 'What was your last salary?'"
I never answer that question.
Almost always it's been recruiters asking that (and only some recruiters, the less reputable ones).
This is a seller's market for IT talent. You don't have to give in to bullying tactics to get a good job. I've had to walk away exactly once when a recruiter wouldn't accept that I wasn't going to tell him my previous salary and refused to work with me on that basis. The other recruiters who've asked accepted my refusal to reveal that information. They're generally more interested in getting paid for recruiting you than in finding out what you used to be paid.
I also never reveal the salary I'm looking for and insist on doing my own salary negotiations with the employer. I let the employer make an offer they think is reasonable and go from there.
You do have to be willing to walk away in the handful of times when this leads to an impasse. Fortunately, the way the IT job market is right now, there are plenty of other fish in the pond, and not showing your hand prematurely puts you in a much stronger negotiating position.
But it goes the other way, too.
I've been contacted by many many recruiters offering interesting jobs but won't discuss the salary range targeted for that position. So how much time are you willing to spend on resume polishing, phone screens, on-site interviews, getting to an offer...just to find out that they can't even come close to your current salary?
So now I just flat out say what my jump-number is. Any answer other than "yeah, we can work with that" is a reason to end the conversation and save everybody's time.
So now I just flat out say what my jump-number is. Any answer other than "yeah, we can work with that" is a reason to end the conversation and save everybody's time.
Can't upvote that enough! I've been doing this for years. I don't have time to waste and if they won't talk the numbers there is no point in having the conversation. Statements like "we are competitive" or my other favorite "can you send us proof of your current salary" are hilarious. The proof is my favorite. What is the point of that? If I won't talk to you for less than x dollars there is no value in proving what I currently make.
No, you never give out a number. It's like asking the person sitting across from you to show you their cards before placing a bet.
If a company is willing to pay $100K and you throw out a number, say $80K for example, then how much are you out?
If your first thought is $20K, then you'd probably be wrong. You would be correct if you stayed only one year with the company. However, every year you're with the company you're out another $20K not to mention any salary bumps or profit share that is a percentage of your salary, etc... After 5 years, you're out $100K.
You never give out your number.
When you are asked, "what's it going to take", you should always answer with something like: you're most competitive offer. I don't feel this is rude at all.
I usually recap how key points from the interview. Come back with how you believe you would add value to X and would love to work on Y and that your best competitive offer would get the ball rolling.
Your job is to find out the maximum a prospective employer is willing to pay. Likewise, a prospective employer is attempting to get the best bang for their buck.
Never show your hand. I've interviewed probably 15-20 times in my career and have never strayed from this course. Now I'm a business owner. I've interviewed 100s of people over the years and it never ceases to amaze me how many candidates flat out give me a number when I ask.
Head hunters are pain in the ass to deal with. They insist on knowing where you're at because they don't want you wasting their time. Well, tough shit! Head hunters need to figure out what the going rates are for whatever it is they are seeking candidates for. A good head hunter will let you negotiate for yourself.
>No, you never give out a number. It's like asking the person sitting across from you to show you their cards before placing a bet.
The thing I've never understood about this approach is the reason it's suggested not to give your number first is, presumably, it can anchor your salary negotiations lower than what the company was originally prepared to offer.
I've switched jobs a few times for no other reason than to get a huge salary jump, and I've always given my salary requirements to a recruiter or during the interview process based on the high, high end of industry salary surveys in my field based on my years of experience. Sometimes the conversation will stop then and there, but a few times they've bitten and I've gotten the huge raise. Not to be smug or anything, but I'm fairly sure I'm making quite a bit more than most of the co-workers I've had in similar roles, even if they have more experience than me.
From my perspective, I'm anchoring the salary negotiations on the high end, as opposed to letting the recruiter spit out a number first and anchor the negotiation on the low end. What would I gain from letting them make an offer first?
The "never give it out" camp always, to me, seems to be making the assumption that salary negotiation is exactly like a game of poker. No one could ever guess what's in your hand and you can't guess what's in theirs. You better bluff all the way to the end and if your hand is better then you win.
Most people can look at payscale or glassdoor though. If I'm putting out a Junior req for a front end position for a CRUD product, then I know pretty well what I'm looking for, and the salary range is pretty set. When someone comes in the game they're playing is "let me convince you why I'm worth the upper end of the range (or even a bit more)", and my game is "let me get you down to the lower end of the range by convincing you how awesome we are, etc." The underlying assumption is that our mental ranges overlap somewhat. If someone comes in and their range doesn't overlap with mine, even if they are supremely talented and worth it, it still won't work out, because I'm not looking for a Senior person, remember? People, most often, hire for best fit not let's get the best person possible. If someone comes in and their expectations are grossly out of sync with my own, it's better to just have it out. If I'm out of sync with reality then the market will correct me or I'll perish, either way it's no skin off the back of the candidates who said, "way too low, see ya later!"
100% agree with just about everything you said except if I may expand a bit.
"If someone comes in and their range doesn't overlap with mine"
Right there is where I think both sides need to do their homework. I have interviewed many candidates over the years that had no clue what the going rate was for a given market and given area.
Example: Oracle DBAs in New York and SanFran command more than the same Oracle DBA working in Detroit at one of the big 3 automotive companies. If you don't understand these dynamics, you're pretty much at a disadvantage and that goes for both sides.
It's only true to never give out your number if you have a nontrivial probability of being offered a higher salary than said number.
If you expect $X and only 5% of employers out there are willing to pay >=$X, it might very well be worth your time to state $X at the start to avoiding wasting countless hours in an interviewing process.
They should tell you their range before beginning, not the other way around.
Recruiters already have a massive advantage: they have much better knowledge of the market (many more datapoints), why give them for free an additional advantage they can only use against you?
That may also largely depend on who the recruiter you're talking to works for. If it's HR for the company that's different than a third party technical recruiter like a TEKSystems or something. The third party technical recruiter, which is who I'm usually talking to, has no real incentive to low-ball you.
It depends on the Tech recruiter. If you are going to contract through one of those companies, some scumbags will NOT give you the real billing rate, and thus have plenty of reasons to screw you. I have seen how a vendor might charge the same for three people, and then learn through other sources that those three people were getting paid differently by the vendor. A vendor can also ask for a rate increase, and just not tell your contractor a thing, and pocket the difference.
That space is full of very shady people, and that's before we get into immigration issues and foreigners. If you don't have the billing rate, and can confirm with the company that yes, that's the billing rate they are paying, beware.
I've been consulting for years now and I almost never know what the consulting firm bills for my time. It's irrelevant to me. My rate is already above the rate in my market. If someone lands me a gig and they have 100% markup, then good on them.
And if it's the company they actually don't know the market any better than you.
Why do you think that's the case? A typical company is hiring at least one person per month, and depending on the size of the company, probably many more. Plus, if people keep telling them the numbers, they can get a pretty good idea of the state of the market just from talking to all the candidates, which gives them quite a lot of datapoints. Do you do a monthly salary survey of a random selection of 30 people in comparable job roles?
I think it goes both ways. The employer may have talked to 30 people looking for comparable job roles in the last month but they almost certainly haven't ever talked to the 10 other companies in the area that are hiring for similar job roles.
This is great advice, and I agree with most of it.
As a headhunter, I wholeheartedly agree that you should never give out a number in negotiations. By doing so, you either sell yourself short or price yourself out. These days, especially, technical talent has the leverage and should use it to their advantage. When the market cycle shifts and employers have more strong applicants than necessary, it will be different. That's why, like you said, the $20K difference today will pay huge dividends over the long-term.
I disagree on "going rates." That lumps candidates into an average, which is unfair to them. Salary negotiations are complex and presumptions on the part of a headhunter will backfire.
Above all, I want transparency upfront. My ideal situation is when I know that the candidate's and employer's approximate compensation ranges are aligned. Granted, it's rare, but there's nothing worse than a positive interview process followed by the surprise reveal that both parties were way off in their expectations. The time wasted for the headhunter is negligible compared to that of both the employer and candidate. This is why I want to know the rough ranges at the onset. However, I agree that headhunters are trained to place undue pressure on candidates for specific numbers and it's a poor practice.
Presumably if you're female, then you can use "equal" pay legislation to ensure you get whatever the best male negotiator got. Thus you could accept a lower wage up front in order to seal the deal.
Always give your number first. It's called anchoring. Backed by good research.
To me it depends a lot on the job though, which is not always clear up front, so I usually like to find out a little more about what they have in mind. My real "minimum salary" is a really huge range, roughly anywhere from $70k to $130k depending on what kind of job it is. I do AI research, which can be more or less applied, and more or less "researchy". Is there very interesting work, good vacation policy, freedom to pursue research, and company support for me publishing code & papers? I'll take quite a bit less money for that kind of job. Less interesting work, less freedom, little time off, and a no-publishing policy? Well, then I'll want a much higher salary.
Yup on every call a sale is made, either you sell them on a reason they can pay you that much or they sell you on a reason they can't.
Taking on a fuck you pay me attitude is the best thing that ever happened to my life.
Seriously, this is good advice, if you're in the above average skill set range in an area that is in demand, such as senior sys admin/ senior programmer, and various other combos. Then you can name your price, the trick is finding a company that can afford you and isn't a total shit place to work for.
I took a decent cut in pay just to be able to work for a company I actually really like. And while I can't afford to buy a new computer nearly as often I do get to work with really fun people and on projects that I really care about.
Are you guys both over 45? Just curious.
I'm 32 and I've been setting my price for the past 4 years. I also didn't get out much for 6 years :D but it was worth it.
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My standard response is "What is the pay range? Who is the client?" to the recruiter emails. The recruiters that get back to you generally mean business. Because of this, I have a huge amount of data on contract rates now. Also, a good side effect is that at least someone is telling them their rates are too low. Hope it helps another consultant down the line...
You should share that data, help your fellow job hunters.
Last time I worked at a BigTechCo, salary ranges were $85-100K for juniors, 120-130 mid-level, and 150-165 for senior devs. Bonuses tend to hover around 30%. Of course, stock grants varied widely.
The largest IC pay I saw was $2M/year for a someone who years ago was part of a famous project -- semi-known guy. More recently, I've seen (indirectly) BigTechCo's offering $300-350/year total comp to mid-levels, and 5-600K to seniors.
Anyone else wanna share?
>Anyone else wanna share?
Yes please do (everyone). The reason is to drive wages up. Hiding this knowledge doesn't protect YOU, it raises the bar for your next job. They're going to outsource and insource you anyway so that's nothing to fear.
Looking for an entry level Django gig and have always wondered what it should be (of course market matters). Generally stated, finding -any- developer under 85K is a bargain IMO and you pretty much confirmed that. I know many make less than 85 (like me), but I've had it with being taken advantage of as well. Only have so many healthy years to provide, next job is going to be the right deal to take care of my family.
Why wait for the next job? If both you and your employer understand your wage is under market value, your work is good, and you are reliable, why are you hesitating bringing up your current pay? Give them a number that works for you.
*edit- wow that ended up a lot longer than intended.
Interesting point and totally valid. I agree with your sentiment, though sitting back, it reads idealistic to me. Easier stated than done. But I did exactly that last year. My manager and his, our director responded well to it. I was prepared to walk if they feigned offense/anger (had that happen once years ago at another place). I got a decent raise, 10%. I don't expect any existing job to go much further than that TBH. Usually asking for 10% or more will earn you a good laugh.. your initial salary usually sets the pace till you leave.
I felt that was them being generous as a very large corporation such as mine goes. It was out of bounds, did not affect this year's standard raise and so forth. I've made them a lot of money, hundreds of thousands a year in direct billables for 5 years now, I think I peaked there in 2013 at $400,000 for the company. At my rate, $220 that's almost billing all day everyday for the year. Of course, I have a support system but you still have to bill the time and do the work. Plus the intangible benefits of my employment there and have been getting "exceeds expectations" for the last couple of years. I don't think there's a time that I didn't come through, and I never say/said "I don't know" to things (which drives me nuts to hear from people as I'm a stubborn researcher). I mentioned all of this, had hard numbers ready and so forth when asking for the raise.
I didn't hesitate to ask for it when the time was right. 4 years of pretty clutch contributions (if I must say so myself) and a large, critical project coming up that only I could accomplish for them (they foolishly let everyone else go with knowledge of the product). But you can't keep going back time and time again asking for bigger raises, and that 10% was determined by HR doing their market research. I didn't get to give any input. To put me where I should be would've been a 20K raise. I knew that was a pretty tough task though- that's a switching jobs raise.
So at this point, I pretty much have to drop the salary point and continue working. I don't think it's right to keep asking for more without a role change, promotion or significant time passing, it kind of shows they never should've played ball the first time IMO. If I want a big raise again, I'll just have to move on one day. I wouldn't mind switching stacks anyway to something Python. I'm also able to work from home, so I'm looking for the best place to put down some roots and start looking for that role. Austin, Vancouver, WA (Portland) or Chicago. So that freedom has a lot of value.
I'm only hesitant to do that because most of my career has been abusive, long unpaid overtime and I've been fairly easy to exploit because I was your typical virtuous midwesterner who has been turned fairly cynical when I found said values like "work hard, get the money" weren't really true. I have a strong sense of justice, so when I feel wronged I get fired up.
My belief was that if I came through on every job and project, I'd be recognized and taken care of. It's not true, you're just the dummy who works his ass off sacrificing your health in the process. When you're burned, they dump you for a new model. No one cares about you. You just need to shut the laptop down at 5:30PM and walk out the door. Damn what everyone else does or thinks, as unpaid overtime is the root of all evil.
The last couple of years it's been the first time I've received humane treatment and spooked to start over somewhere else. :)
Like I said, it's a very large corporation and I highly dislike the lack of passionate employees for the tech. It's a technical graveyard. But there's not much drama and nonsense going on, which I appreciate. So many offices are full of clowns and egos and I'm glad to be out of that. Not to mention, after 5 years everyone knows me, and I know I'm not perfect either.
It's a balance, money isn't everything but getting as much as possible without being made miserable is the goal. I almost got so burned up that I didn't want anything to do with tech-anything, and I'm really glad I didn't quite reach that threshold.
Some point I'll seek out that new role for the bigger raise, and get out of the tech graveyard. I'm bored, capable of more and I need to do it for my wife and kids we're aiming to have.
I feel you on this:
Like you I struggle with trying to do the right thing, and put in unhealthy hours. Although it sounds like I haven't reached your level of enlightenment yet (even though I think I'm a few years older than you).The last couple of years it's been the first time I've received humane treatment and spooked to start over somewhere else.I think the trap I fall into is telling myself that the long hours are for my own good. "Well, at least this 58302-hour week is helping me to really polish my skills in this stack." Which is actually fucking true to an extent, which is why it's a seductive trap. I mean, there really is no substitute for putting in the hours if you're looking to hone a craft. And honing that craft is a big part of what will allow one to earn for one's family 5, 10, 20 years down the line.
But people say, "so look for a new job if this one's unhealthy!" like it's as easy as changing a pair of socks.
Changing jobs is challenging and disruptive and it's very difficult to ensure you'll wind up at a company with a healthier culture, particularly if you're already working at a company with a culture that's already above average for your field. And especially if the workaholism problem largely comes from inside yourself, like it does for me. Changing companies won't fix that.
It's even more complicated when explaining myself to family because of the bizarre image that people have of the tech industry! People see Google's "adult playground for engineers" workplace image in stories on 60 minutes and think the life of a programmer is just playing around all day long. It's not even that way at Google, much less your average tech company.
I still think doing the right thing is important. It burns you out, causes health issues, and doesn't mean it will pay off, but it's important in general. It hasn't been positive for me yet, and has created a long strand of negative issues, as mentioned above. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future, but I am not willing to part with that part just yet.
These daus I don't even want it to pay off financially, I just want to make something to be proud over and stability. I remember seeing an article on how Marissa Mayer was displeased with being demoted to Maps. I thought how amazing one has to be, to be demoted to Maps.
300-350 for mid level developers and up to 600 for seniors? Where is this?
Big tech companies in silicon valley.
I want to believe the numbers you provide are right, but then I look at https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Salaries-E40772.ht... and cant see where to get more reliable sources for thinking facebook or google pay that.
Keep in mind that the people who make a lot more than that are highly motivated not to share. I know for example that the Netflix salaries on Glassdoor are definetely too low, since I know a broad range of salaries there.
Those salaries on Glassdoor pretty much match what I'm saying, with salaries running up to $165 for senior devs. Add 30% for bonus and $100-150K in stock and you're into the $300K+ range I'm describing.
The $600K+ figure is for director level and above.
The $2M/year individual contributor was an outlier.
$150k salary + $150k stock does not equal $300k salary. Not even in SV. And that 30% bonus sounds like made up nonsense.
Why the hostility? I'm not making any of this up. That bonus is typical of multiple places I've been, usually comprising 15% individual performance bonus and 15% company performance.
And of course 150 sal != 300 sal. 300+ is total comp, as I already said.
Software Engineer 5 at Facebook is total comp $268k on glassdoor. Your estimates are way too high.
They're really not - Glassdoor in my experience has always skewed low, after all it's self-reported. Highly-paid people tend to have more reason to stay quiet and not report these numbers because - as we've seen elsewhere in this thread - it often engenders hostility.
I know personally I was more loose about talking money when I was being paid a lot less than I am now.
The big players like AmaGooFaceSoft are routinely paying $300-400k for mid-level talent (5-10 yrs exp), and more for more senior.
In any case, these numbers ought to be known - much of startup-dom hinges on engineers not knowing what the big players are actually paying. If you can successfully convince someone that Facebook doesn't pay more than $200k, a startup salary suddenly seems more attractive. As someone who spent a lot of time in startups personally, I know my jaw hit the floor when I first found out about how high comp can get in BigTechCo.
And then I jumped ship.
Also worth noting: BigTechCo itself hinges on engineers not knowing what they pay ranges are. They absorb tons of talent coming out of startups and academia who were being paid a pittance, and even if they're willing to pay top dollar for this talent, they surely won't volunteer. All the more reason to not answer the "how much are you making right now" question, ever! Revealing your (comparatively low) startup/academia salary is a good way to make sure the "$300-400k" range immediately gets pulled off the table.
I more or less tripled an (absurdly low) salary not that many years ago thanks to being warned to dodge the trap questions about previous comp and how much I 'need to get by' or such.
Looking back, I still made some mistakes, because my comp shot up by over 10% in a mid-year adjustment after they found out how well I was performing as the job itself was a really good fit for both of us.
Anyhow, that's some incredibly valuable advice and I'm glad for threads like these cluing me in on how the game works.
If I look at the Glassdoor salaries for places I've worked the numbers (total comp especially, but also base salary) are sometimes quite low.
They get less accurate the higher up you go (where you also have less data points), I think mainly it's a combination of sparse data + older data points being way out of whack with recent increases due to the competitive market.
I've personally seen numbers at several places that some people on HN vehemently tell me I shouldn't believe... and sometimes, even Glassdoor seems to give numbers that a lot of commenters here don't always seem to believe (like that $268k number).
I am a lowly Software Engineer 3 at Google. My total compensation for 2015 was approximately $270k. Base salary is between $140-150k. Bonus percentage 30%. Stock made up the rest.
For Google at least, those numbers are pretty much spot on.
Source - I'm a mid-level engineer at Google and my total comp is within the stated range.
Google and Facebook don't let it be easily known who their highest paid employees are, or even that they exist. They'd get poached.
What's a jump-number? Googling it came up with your comment as the top result and then skydiving :)
The salary number that would convince joezydeco to "jump ship".
jump ship to the new opportunity (meaning a high number), or jump ship on the conversation (meaning his bare minimum number)?
Jump to the new job. Doesn't necessarily have to be a high number, but if I'm not looking for a lateral (meaning, I like my current job), then it should be significantly larger than what I'm making in salary/benefits today.
I can see how that's ambiguous, and this is just an assumption, but I assumed he meant "jump ship to a new opportunity" because starting off with the lowest number you'd accept seems like a bad negotiation strategy :)
I've found this to be an excellent way to waste a bunch of time by getting far along in the process, only to find out near the end that the company won't make an offer that's anywhere near my requirements. While I don't like being the first to name a number, I also haven't found putting the discussion off until the end of the process to be beneficial.
I've been on the hiring side as a manager in a number of companies, and I've NEVER seen a situation where a candidate was so uniquely awesome that the company was willing to make an offer drastically larger than their normal range for that role. A bit more? Sure. Some more stock or something? Often. But not, say, 50% more salary than anyone else at that level is getting.
After many years in this industry on both the candidate and hiring manager side, I believe that it's in everyone's best interest to make sure you can at least get in the right ballpark early in the process before you waste everyone time.
> I've been on the hiring side as a manager in a number of companies, and I've NEVER seen a situation where a candidate was so uniquely awesome that the company was willing to make an offer drastically larger than their normal range for that role. A bit more? Sure. Some more stock or something? Often. But not, say, 50% more salary than anyone else at that level is getting.
Fyi, at $DayJob we have one guy at my level who makes 50% more than anyone else at the level he is at.
So it does happen but its unusual. [e.g. Developer A-Z get $60-80k, Developer Unicorn gets $120k]
How about when so-so dev makes 50% more than rock star dev! It's real.
Why? The underperformer w/high-salary was brought in by some idiot manager x years ago - that manager has since lost their job - but this ok performer still pretty good and still in their job.
Have had rock stars contact the company - willing to work for 50% under market and we'd be crazy not to put them on. Without even having an open position at the time.
It is ALL negotiation. Don't assume there is solid logic and "fair" salaries.
A lot of times in situations like this there's eventually pressure from above to manage such people out ... for obvious reasons.
From my experience at small medium startups, some dev gets higher pay because he/she is attractive and socially well adjusted and not nerdy. Not necessarily better coder.
> socially well adjusted
Don't underestimate this. Being a better code doesn't make you a better employee.
Nope but they tend to serve other needs like keeping a good social structure within the company and being presentable to investors or doing client facing pre-sale / post-sale work besides coding.
There are allot of ways that a company can monetize their employees and allot of factors that end up being calculated to come up with the figure they end up paying for them, being socially well adjusted and attractive can have a good effect on your salary as people both tend to equate intelligence to good looks oddly enough and that they could use you for other things as well.
In some cases it also might be ticking a box kind of thing I've seen companies recruit attractive females before to both tick the diversity box and to keep some of the more social awkward coders working harder (this came directly from the mouth of a female headhunter that even boasted she specializes in hiring office eye candy that can do some coding on the side).
The thing is none of the coders at old job were needed in customer interaction. Think it was more of eye candy, cool guy to have around, founder had common hobbies like football etc.
Not saying they were needed, however your old employer still might have had a couple of boxes that said "can be presented to investors?" "can be used for pre-sale?" which the hire manager had to tick off at the time they hired them.
Many people at the end tend to do other things than the basis they were hired on, how many times have you seen some "X guru" or "Y expert" and "Z evangelist" being hired at a premium only to end up doing the same crap as everyone else once that specific project fell through?
Salaries can be quite "arbitrary" mostly because that while there is some fine tuned formula behind it on many occasions it doesn't really survives it's with meeting reality, the more traditional "old school" enterprises are probably the best at actually maintaining some logical relationship between experience, responsibilities and salary while the newer tech companies tend to be more erratic and considerably dislike rocking the boat even in cases when an employee does no longer deserve their initial starting salary.
I know that happens but it sucks. We pay everyone based on merit. The quietest, nerdiest person is paid the same as the most attractive, outgoing person with the same skills.
How are you defining 'level'? Two individual contributors are not at the same level just because they do relatively the same job. I'm sure some of the better IC engineers at my company make 2x or more what the new guys do, but there is 15 years of experience between them.
Same job title. All relatively junior developers with less than 10 years of experience. Unicorn has 4.
How are you a junior developer after 10 years of experience? That's pretty mid/senior level at that point.
I said relatively junior. [i.e. They have no management responsibilities and are pure developers]
We pretty much have Developer -> Senior Developer -> CTO.
Depends on indistry, but 10 years is far from senior. (ignoring title inflation.)
How old are you?
I think something often unsaid in conversations about stuff like this is that ageism is rampant in the tech sector. I haven't experienced it first-hand (and I'm probably just now approaching the age where it might be a factor, and I haven't looked for a full-time job in a couple of decades), but I know several folks who have. Even when they've been willing to take lower salaries, when applying for startups, in particular, older folks often get passed over. It gets called things like "cultural fit", etc.
But, the thing is, we're talking about a "low six-figure salary" here, which is not that high for engineering work. In fact, in many markets, it's the baseline for anyone with more than a couple of years experience. I can't believe salary is the primary motivating factor, if it is a reasonable salary, well within the bounds of expected pay for people with experience.
I haven't been in the job market since I was quite young (I've run my own companies since my 20s, with some contract work along the way to make ends meet), but, I know my dad experienced this to some degree; and he was an engineer in an industry that was not nearly as ageist as high tech fields often are (he worked in the oil and gas industry). His salary climbed through his 30s and 40s, and then finding work became more difficult in his 50s, and he retired early partly due to health issues, but also because of difficulty finding good long-term work.
I don't think salary is the only factor here, especially given that most of the folks I know who've experienced this aren't insisting on making more than their peers doing the same work. The people motivated by money tend to rise up to management roles. The engineers who are driven by the desire to build things just want to make a decent salary while being in an environment where they get to build things. The most productive software engineer I think I've ever worked with was in his late 50s, and was making less than a number of developers in the company (but he had a private office and a few other perks that no one else got, and got to work on stuff that excited him, so he seemed reasonably content).
I would not tell recruiters my current salary, ($75K) but I did tell him my target salary, which was market rate for a mid-level Ruby dev in my city. ($115K) He wanted to go in at $110K.
I kept telling him how odd it was to be negotiating salary upfront, and he told me "that's just how recruiting works." I just shrugged and let him do his job. If I'd wanted to negotiate my salary myself, I wouldn't be using a recruiter. Truth be told, I'd take $95K.
I learned from the art world, a lot of times "market value" is a fiction created by people whose job it is to manage expectations on all sides. It's in everybody's best interest to simply accept the status quo. Sure, you can buck the system and gain an additional $10-20K, but that takes a lot of effort and I'd rather put that effort elsewhere.
People buy into the cult of individualism too much. There was an article a month or so back about the maple syrup cartel. People here were applauding the renegades bucking the cartel. Not me. I'd get on very good terms with my cartel rep, get him a very good gift basket for Christmas, jump through every hoop they want me to jump through. The cartel takes a nasty, volatile market and smooths it out and makes it into a nice, reliable engine. That's what I want to be a part of. Not a damn free-for-all.
Any other career field, it would be 10+ years before I can make $100K. Here I managed to do it in 3 years. Be a team player. Climb the ladder, pay your dues. It doesn't take as long as you think.
> Be a team player. Climb the ladder, pay your dues. It doesn't take as long as you think.
This attitude is why engineers get bullied and steamrolled into working for a small fraction of the value they create for their employers, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table over the course of their careers. Being a team player is for after you're on the team -- but before that happens it's not personal, it's business. Anyone who takes it personally and not as a purely business negotiation is not someone you should work for.
I'd argue that it's a lack of professionalism that's the real problem. It's easy to negotiate yourself out of a perfectly good job offer if you don't know what you're doing. And lets be honest, most devs haven't the slightest clue how to do salary negotiations. Someone posted Patrick's guide, and that's a good start, but you need to learn a whole bunch of little lessons about the corporate world before you can really start to apply them effectively.
Until then, why not just work for market rate or just slightly below? Don't stress yourself out, there's no reason to and it'll hurt your bargaining position. 90% of it is done before you even get to the table anyway.
It doesn't matter how much value you create for your employer; it is how many other people around can create the same value for your employer.
By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.
Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
From http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
There's a couple more quotes like that. Very similar to your point.
"If I'd wanted to negotiate my salary myself, I wouldn't be using a recruiter."
For me, recruiters are useful for two reasons: to find me interesting opportunities and to help me get an interview.
When they've served those two functions, I'd prefer them to just get out of my way. From that point on, I feel my own interests are best served by me representing myself.
The recruiter's real customer is not really any one particular candidate, who they might see just once in their whole career, but the employer, who will likely be a repeat customer if the recruiter satisfies their needs. Looked upon from that perspective, it's not always in the recruiter's interest to land the candidate the highest salary possible. That might get the recruiter a higher cut that one time, but their real customer might not be too pleased if the recruiter keeps sending them expensive candidates. They'd be far happier if the recruiter managed to get them a sweet deal on a good worker.
So I'll just keep doing my own negotiations, thank you very much.
> The recruiter's real customer is not really any one particular candidate, who they might see just once in their whole career, but the employer, who will likely be a repeat customer if the recruiter satisfies their needs.
And I'm cool with that. Recruiters do an important job for me at the point in my career that I'm at. Cut through the bullshit. I don't want to deal with a wishy-washy employer. I don't want it to be my whiny voice they hear asking them for more money.
I want a buffer. Because if there's one thing I know about corporations it's that there's a lot of stupid thinking going around when it comes to hiring. Employers think they want things when the things they want, once they had, they'll realize they didn't really want that, and you're the one that has to pay the price for that. Using a recruiter means you're serious about hiring.
I want to stay in my own little world and just code. Job hunting is stressful. I'm happy to let the recruiter do the stressful parts for me. Far as I'm concerned it's a fair trade.
$10-20k per year is a lot of money for an extra few hours or days of tenacity.Sure, you can buck the system and gain an additional $10-20K, but that takes a lot of effort and I'd rather put that effort elsewhere.They have the same incentives as realtors selling homes. If you're commission's 15%, what's the value of 15% of the extra $5k versus time?
A real estate agent is not likely to sell 15 or 20 houses to the same buyer. But a recruiter could well sell 15 or 20 candidates to the same employer. That gives the recruiter a far greater incentive to please the employer than a real estate agent has to please a buyer.
I own my recruiting agency, and I don't care what your last salary was. I do care about what you are looking for so I don't waste your time, my time, or the client's time. I also realize that any target range you give me before even meeting the client may increase or even decrease after you learn all about the company, team, benefits, etc.
All that said, a candidate that knows their market value should never have to fear talking about salary history or expectations. If you know your market rate, and you stick to that as your expectation, you never have to worry about being underpaid. Market rate can be hard to define sometimes, and there are clearly companies that are willing to pay above market rate in certain scenarios, but candidates who do their research (or trust the knowledge of others) never have to worry about talking compensation.
> All that said, a candidate that knows their market value should never have to fear talking about salary history or expectations.
The main article starts with an anecdote about how talking about salary history prevents a guy from getting work.
This is the case whenever your expected salary gets higher than younger, cheaper replacements are willing to accept. This isn't a problem for people that have made more of their younger years, since the positions they're applying for are high enough leverage positions to justify the higher salary ask and younger workers are simply not qualified to apply.
I see this all the time in applicants. They've spent 15-20 years on the job and have less than 5 years of useful experience. The rest is stagnation where they haven't grown their skills. And yet they expect to be paid as if they've got 15-20 years of useful experience. That's why answering the salary question derails the negotiation. There may be an odd recruiter that is willing to accept the premise that an older worker is able to complete the job's tasks at enough above the acceptable level to justify the increase in cost. But most will opt for a younger worker willing to do an acceptable job.
As someone who's regularly on the other side of the hiring (i.e. negotiating with candidates), I often prefer to have some insight into a candidate's rough salary requirements early in the process -- especially if it's someone that might demand more than I could offer. The hiring process is a huge time commitment for both me and the candidate -- I don't want all that time to be wasted if we could identify early on that it's not going to be a good fit.
I wouldn't necessarily walk away from a candidate who wouldn't share approximate salary requirements early on in the process but it would probably be an added red flag if it was someone where I already had this concern.
So just tell the candidate what the salary range for the position is. If that number's a dealbreaker for them, they'll let you know. Why does it always have to be the candidate who shows their cards first?
Personally, for me there are no salary-based dealbreakers. There's always room for negotiation, after both sides determine there's a good fit.
Consider that recruiters also have to justify their own existence. From a business perspective, their position is a sunk cost. If they can't signal to their employer that their work is gaining the business something above and beyond just doing their day-to-day job then there's no chance of advancement.
They also dislike candidates that show proficiency in business for a few reasons.
First, the candidate is more likely to move on for a better opportunity.
Second, people with a business background like to 'shake things up' and head in new directions looking to maximize the potential of a company. Considering that HR's other primary responsibility is protecting the business from legal action, it's in their best interest to choose candidates who will stay on the straight and narrow and not shake things up.
Third, business types ignore the 'gatekeepers' and take action on their own. They may make a groundbreaking decision that takes the business in a new and more profitable direction. Unfortunately for HR, it's hard to ride on the back of an accomplishment that they weren't aware of to begin with. Worse yet, that same type of personality may have the potential to climb up the chain to a level where they're the boss of the HR person one day.
They aggressively select for 'code monkeys' because code monkeys do what their told, don't have enough soft skills to be a threat, suck at negotiation, and are too busy nerding out to look for something better.
How does HR "ride on the back of an accomplishment?" For example, if a sales team hits their sales goals how is it that HR would get credit for this? Are you grouping "management" under the umbrella of HR?
I give candidates a range if they ask.
I think the issue is that a fair number of people doing hiring think this is still the 1980s. People worth hiring would like the company to be upfront with them too. If you put the salary range in the posting or mentioned it upfront then problem solved no?
Then you should share the range for the position and let the candidate decide if it's worth continuing.
I share if the candidate asks. In the end the candidates requirements come out though. If I say X, they'll often say, oh I really need Y. I can work with that. If they just walk away when I say X, that's fine too -- it wasn't a good fit.
That's not a fit issue. They just don't want to work for that wage. Find someone who will. Why do they have to ask? If you're really interested in efficiency, state it upfront, atleast the lower and upper bounds.
It doesn't matter to me who asks first, just the the discussion is had to avoid wasting time if it's likely to be a problem. Sometimes they ask about salary range, sometimes I ask about salary requirements.
Debating whether a disconnect on $$ is a "fit" issue seems kind of silly. If it's not a job they would take because of pay, it's not a good fit for them.
Precision matters. Fit is a poorly used term to basically mean, we don't want you for reason X but don't want to tell you that.
Precision matters, but you're just nitpicking based on your interpretation of "fit". I guess you're thinking of it as whether the candidate is "fit" for the position. My use of it was referring to whether it was a fit for what they're looking for (where money is obviously an important factor).
Simple solution. Set up an Ask HN: What does job not being a good fit mean to you. See how many people say it relates to cultural fit vs pay.
Posting the salary range for the position solves this problem.
The salary range I can pay friends on a lot of factors, not just the position. Oftentimes I can adjust the salary and title (up or down) to be appropriate for the candidate. But if a candidate asks what range of salary the position would pay, I'll give an estimate.
So I presume you are sharing your salary range early, then?
Sure, if the candidate asks, I'll give a range. Of course, it's still a negotiation so my range may be a bit lower than I could actually go but I expect the same of whatever numbers candidates offer up. If I say 120k is my top and he needs 175k, there's no reason to move forward. If the numbers aren't that far apart we can go forward and see what happens.
I actually am happy to reveal the salary, mainly because I find myself on the higher end of the compensation scale for my experience. When you're on the higher end, it can help on the candidate side to avoid wasting time with prospective employers who want to lowball.
It also doesn't stop me from negotiating hard, since I have turned down drastically higher numbers than most companies are willing to pay, so they know I easily have options. I'm more than willing to walk away from recruiters (and employers) who want to coerce me into accepting bad deals. Setting number expectations upfront with knowledge of the market saves me time, and tends to be enough to weed out the crap.
As long as the recruiter (either a headhunter or a company recruiter) is up front with what they can offer compensation wise I don't have a problem telling them where I'm at and where I want to be salary-wise. If it's apparent that there's no match there - saves time to all the parties involved. Sure you don't want to be "pigeonholed" into an X..Y salary bucket forever but for the short term while looking for the next opportunity that's just the reality of the situation.
I'm the exact opposite. I'm at a rate that's above the local market, so I mostly have to work remotely for firms in areas with higher cost of living. Any recruiter is going to find my salary range within the first 90 seconds of talking to me. This allows me to filter out 90% of calls because the salary range they're offering isn't even close.
If recruiters are chasing me while I'm gainfully employed...
I, jack up the rate Im currently making, which has worked once; got a better paying gig.
If recruiters are chasing me while I'm looking for my next gig...
I make up a fair livable wage salary that won't push me out of consideration
My mentality going in is "please give me a reason to walk away". The few that don't are always surprising offers and get me excited. I go in determined to find a reason to walk away.
You're not worried about wasting your time on salary mismatches?
I expect there is more than one factor at work here.
I've known folks who "grew up" in a single company; joined out of college, worked there 15+ years, got annual raises, then got laid off and then couldn't find work at their previous salary. And the expectation of an annual raise kept forcing up their salary but I don't think the company was actually evaluating whether or not the person was getting more valuable over time.
I once had an interesting conversation with a recruiter who wanted me to pony up my current compensation. I asked, "Why is that relevant? You are the one with the job, and you are willing to pay some amount for someone to do that job, isn't it up to me to decide if I would be willing to do that job at the price offered?" There are jobs I would do for free, and jobs that you almost couldn't pay me enough to take, and that has nothing at all to do with what I'm currently being paid.
And if someone insists, I really do think they are looking to have something on paper that they can point to which will give them a safe "out" for hiring someone else while minimizing lawsuits. So much safer than "we are looking for someone who has more time to spend in this position", or "we were really hoping for a masculine point of view", or "we don't think you could relate culturally to our customers." All of which would violate the equal opportunity guidelines.
Regarding your first point, I think it's important to think about the fact that you may well be worth more to your current company than to another one, if you've been there a long time.
Your experience in exactly what your current company does, the way it does it, the relationships you have within the organisation etc may mean that part of your worth within the organisation is related to how long you've been there.
I completely agree with this, there is certainly a strong value in knowing how to get things done within a particular company, and it is something that is usually not well documented.
However, I have also observed that this value is also quite hard to quantify. I have seen the key individual to a particular process get transferred or leave after a management change resulted in their "food chain" not understanding this value. Only later when they ask "Why can't we ship X any more?" do they find out that person they felt was over paid and under utilized was in fact quite essential. Sadly, management that clueless is prone to yelling at everyone else rather than do a little introspection.
Both sides are interested in getting a price and, ultimately, it's the person in the weaker position who ends up revealing theirs. Imagine the roof of your house was getting old and started to leak, so you figure it's time to replace it. Upon contacting a roofing company and inquiring what it would cost, they say "You're the one who wants a new roof and are willing to pay for that being done, so you should be offering a price. How much is having a dry roof over your family's head and preserving your home's value by avoiding water damage worth to you? What's the current value of your home? Perhaps we can work on a percentage basis since we're protecting your investment for the next 20 years." Of course, you wouldn't accept such an "enterprise sales" tactic because they're in the weaker position (fairly close to being a commodity) and you have dozens of qualified choices so you'll insist they reveal their hand.
A job situation is no different. If it's a role requiring only "commodity" experience which dozens of qualified candidates are available for and wanting, they're going to pick the best combination of price and performance that they can find. If you have special talents that only you are uniquely suited for, you're the one who will be asking them about their offer.
True, in the article the people are looking for jobs as opposed to being cold called / emailed by a recruiter. As an employer one of the things I liked about hired.com was that you could put out there the salary you were willing to pay for the position and that got that out of the way right away.
It's an interesting analogy. I would say the customer is in the stronger position and while granted a rare bird has negotiating power - that means the employer is ultimately in the stronger position of the employer/employee relationship.
Very true. Sometime back I interviewed a person for Java related work. He had roughly 20 years of experience. Unfortunately most of knowledge and skills were intimately related to his last employer. The said person was jobless for 1 year so. Apparently not much use of company specific skills.
The moral of the story: never, never, NEVER answer questions about your salary to a recruiter. It firmly pigeonholes your next salary to your current one, instead of the value you bring to a company.
Patrick MacKenzie's article on salary negotiations is excellent (I would maybe even say "required") reading on the subject.
Recruiter here. I think: "The moral of the story: never, never, NEVER answer questions about your salary to a recruiter." is pretty simplistic and naive. You simply have to figure out how to get what you want. If you want 180 and currently make 140 and a recruiter asks what you make, just say something like "my expectation for my next role is around 180". You say that and you both probably get what you want and save a lot of back and forth.
Exactly. There is never a reason to tell anyone your current salary, just what you're looking for now.
Not a recruiter but I've gotten all but my current job through recruiters.
I think the quoted moral still applies - you obviously have to disclose what you want to earn if you expect to actually earn that. However, what I made at my last job had zero bearing on my expected salary at my current job. If a recruiter is just trying to find out what I want, they can ask. However, I think more often than not they're getting paid on the spread and if they can place me in a job with a cap of $180 for $150, they'll do so and pocket whatever their percentage of the spread is.[0]
[0] I know this isn't how all recruiters are paid, but many are.
While I'm mostly an internal recruiting manager, I've signed a lot of these deals and have a lot of recruiter friends and know their general contract structure. I do not know of anyone and have never seen a recruiter compensation package where they were paid on spread. That just seems like an incentive to hire someone other than the best person for the job. Seems really strange to me.
As recently as 2010 Aerotek paid their recruiters exclusively on a percentage of spread.
Exactly! I wish more recruiters thought like this. There's absolutely no point for either the recruiter or the candidate to go through an interview process only to get an offer that won't be accepted. For instance, I'm working at a great place right now, and it would take a significant bump in salary to get me to even consider moving.
Thanks for the insight. Though most of your peers I've dealt with only frame it as "what's your current salary" not expectations.
I think he meant questions about current (or past) salary.
I get that. I'm just saying that this is a great situation to basically answer a different question and give the person the exact data you want to give them. Everybody wins.
That's the one. Probably Patrick's best piece of advice, in terms of broad application.
Content is great. Anti-iDevice editor note is odd:
> [Editor’s note: At nearly 7,000 words, you probably don’t want to try reading this on an iDevice. Bookmark it and come back later.]
My iDevice is a 13" 5.6K screen that I hold in my hands like a magazine. Surely better suited to long form reading than a lower res rMBP I generally read at a desk or table.
iPad had Retina display since iPad 3rd Gen released in 2012 when this was written.
I've tried that (nicely), but it backfires too. Some companies are either old school or clueless on what to offer and have treated me pretty badly and called off interviewing further well into interviewing due not telling them that. E.g. "We've NEVER had someone be so stubborn about sharing their salary".
I realize those places were likely toxic, but it can be never-wracking to someone who needs a job.
"We've NEVER had someone be so stubborn about sharing their salary".
If I heard that and felt I was going to walk away anyway, I'd be tempted to throw back "How much do you make?" And watch to see if they squirm to not share.
If they came back with "what I make has nothing to do with this position you're being interviewed for" come back with "then neither does my previous salaries, if they do then I need to know how much other folks in other positions in this company make so I can gauge whether I think this company will still be here in the future."
My form here needs my recruiter's salary before I can move on.
The techniques in Patrick's post are a less abrasive version of this.
The key point is going to walk away anyway
Your goal should be to get several competitive offers rather than simply taking the first thing that somewhat fits. As such you should expect to walk away from several companies.
In any major city you should easily be able to burn bridges it's simply not a big deal.
Hmm, I would just say something in line with what I want out of the new company. They want a number, they can have a number. They might not like it, but that's life.
"Say, ‘I’m open to a salary commensurate with the job,” recommended Blake Nations, a former recruiter who was laid off and then founded Over50JobBoard.com. “And if they keep going, ask: ‘What do you expect to pay someone with my experience and education for this position?'"
This. If you're asked early on just flip the question back to them.
Companies don't publish salaries for jobs because they're afraid of turning people off from applying to the job in the first place. They know applicants are more likely to take a lower offer after they've invested time into the process and maybe have a little rapport with the interviewers. You can use the exact same strategy as a job seeker. Companies can be more likely to accept a higher ask after they've put resources into interviewing you and gotten to know you a bit.
That said, an honest chat about expectations early on - where the hirer says roughly how much they're looking to pay and asks if it's something you'd be interested in - can be a really nice way to save everyone's time.
That advice doesn't apply at all when you are going through a recruiter who is or plays dumb: "I just need you to fill in this form so we can proceed. [I don't care if if makes you mistrust me and management, and you come in on Day 1 suspicious and with low morale]" Big companies, at least, have a relatively streamlined process to tilt the negotiations in their favor as much as they can systemically.
I fill out those forms but leave that field empty. If they have a problem with that, I'll find another recruiter. There's no shortage of them around.
As for big companies, I've never had any of them even notice that I didn't fill in that field. So that's never been an issue.
> After more than 20 years as an electronics engineer, Pete Edwards reached the low six-figure pay level.
Where is it that late-career engineers are barely pulling in six figures? Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of money (3x mean personal income in the US, and ~1.75x mean HHI, give or take), but I'd expect most senior folks in any engineering field to be in the mid 100k range if not pushing 185ish.
> Time and again, he says, employers seem to lose interest after he answers a question that they ask early on: “What was your last salary?”
Your last salary has absolutely no bearing on what you are worth or what the market rate is for the position for which you're applying. You have absolutely nothing to gain by sharing a previous salary.
> A survey by AARP last year found that of job seekers between 45 and 70 years old who found work after a spell of unemployment, nearly half earned less than before.
I don't think this is that surprising, is it? If I make $100k and lose my job, often with little notice, I will take $80k. If I make $100k and leave of my own volition, it's unlikely I'll entertain anything below $110 or $115.
> Where is it that late-career engineers are barely pulling in six figures?
Almost everywhere in the Midwest, except Chicago perhaps.
Unless your remote working, low cost of living doesn't come without a big catch.
No, it's Chicago too, unless you're working on low-latency finance stuff.
Untrue. I lived and worked as a software engineer in Chicago (downtown) for a number of years before moving westward. Most mid-career developers I knew there were comfortably in the 100's and only one worked at the CME ('finance stuff', in C++).
It boils down to simple economic rules. If you're good at developing software, there aren't a lot of people like you looking for a job and the market has a high demand for your skill then you are probably doing something wrong if you're not earning well into the 100's or higher (if that is what you're trying to optimize for).
Which area are you in? Your LinkedIn profile suggests financial/webdev work.
I've been doing embedded/firmware engineering in this area my entire career and, right now, 100K is typical for a senior position with very few positions available over 125K. The only way to go higher is to consult.
Perhaps it's the glut of ex-Moto/ATT/Lucent/Tellabs people floating around. I dunno.
{ If you're going to downvote me, at least provide some counterexamples! I'd love to send out some resumes... =) }
I've seen companies willing to pay >100k in Chicago and relocate people there, for engineers with only ~4 years of experience.
6 figures is the exception, but it's far from impossible in Milwaukee and Madison writing code.
I'm in Madison, approaching my 40s and making well into the six figures. I was just very persistent in looking and found a niche opportunity. Although I do worry about the central premise of the story being true--future raises becoming more difficult especially in the face of a layoff or recession.
Who hires many people in tech in Milwaukee? I'm from there and don't know of anywhere that does much other than basic in-house line-of-business software— is it just banks and insurance companies?
Definitely possible in Madison. I'd assume Epic's fresh-out-of-school starting salary is nearly 6 figures now, if not already above it.
At 45 you become untouchable. Too old to be young, too young to be old. How many 50 year olds do you see in SV companies?
I knew a guy who was about 50, brilliant, brilliant engineer working for one of the big IT players. Well respected and trusted advisor to many customers. He got vaporized in some big restructuring that hit his division.
Because of non-compete and what he did, he was basically out of work for almost a year, and was stuck in career purgatory for a few years doing random contract work.
I see quite a few 50 year olds in larger, more established companies. Older people don't join startups because they can't afford to, as a general rule, but the rest of the age skew that exists is as much because the current round of technological skill set is rooted in the GUI and Internet advances of the 90s as much as anything. That ends up putting a soft bound on career length based on if you did your primary learning before or after that.
Anyone older cut their teeth on assembly or C, NetBIOS, and CLI and may or may not have stayed current afterwards. Consider that the industry was a lot "older" (just look at old pictures) until those technological shifts happened and shook out all the people that learned in the 60s or 70s.
If something like quantum computing or a parallel functional computing revolution or VR/augmented interfaces or anything else grossly disruptive to current development practices comes around, we're all going to be in the same boat: learn or die. Getting through that is not so much a factor of age as the circumstances around age and one's willingness to keep at it.
Oh, please bring the VR/augmented surfaces revolution. I'd happily switch over my career to that. As it is, my next hobby game is probably going to have VR support.
> Anyone older cut their teeth on assembly or C, NetBIOS, and CLI and may or may not have stayed current afterwards.
Is there something wrong with these in that they are not useful anymore? I see a lot of jobs that require these, and I think they're still very relevant. Actually, I'm relatively young and love that stuff and work with that stuff... I'd love to work with someone who's been working with those for decades, experience really does show.
No, they're still useful but the people posting that they don't see older people in tech almost certainly aren't working in these technologies.
Absolutely. The point is, when they get RIFed, they are screwed.
IBM was particularly brutal about this stuff when they were eliminating people still on the pension plan.
I don't understand - I thought non-competes were unenforceable in CA?
Wasn't clear in the CA and the non-compete parts of that comment were connected.
However, in any case, the reality is that for small companies, for all but the most senior and/or desired employees (and even then), a potential non-compete issue just isn't worth dealing with. Doesn't matter whether it would ultimately lose in court, you're just not prepared to go there. That's the real issue with non-competes.
I've worked for a small firm and a candidate with even the most peripheral non-compete was just a non-starter.
Especially if they prevent you from making a living.
Usually a non-compete would be void if you were laid off.
I've worked in NY and MA. They are very enforceable there.
Depending on what "electronics engineer" means it is perfectly viable that he was at a low six figure number. The electrical engineering field generally in the US has been dramatically outsourced to Asia which has caused obvious downward price pressure.
I had to side step into firmware because of this. Amazing that they're starting the beat the drum for even more EEs because of a "shortage" when there are so many now that can't find employment in their field.
"Six-figure salary" encompasses everything from $100k to $999,999 (okay, that's a bit pedantic perhaps but you get what I mean). $185k is still low six-figures.
"six-figure salary" implies a log scale, I would think. So 185k is about a quarter of the way from 100k to 1M. Still potentially "low", I suppose.
Could be in the uk. Tech jobs get sparse once you go over £60k outside London.
Europe, you will only be on 5 figures in most countries.
I work in the engineering department of a large electrical utility company. Although no one here really talks about salary, based on what I am paid and our corporate promotion schedule I assume that most late career engineers are in the very low $100k range. The only people exceeding that would be the managers of the engineering department.
Around here in the mid-atlantic states I know that's the norm - and actually can be lower than that. It's not until you start managing teams do you get near the lower mid 100s.
I have been thinking about this phenomenon for awhile and how to hedge against it. My feeling is that employees are getting more and more exposed to broader economic trends, and not just the low-wage workers.
It's one thing to be at the low end of the totem pole, where anonymity and insecurity force you to hedge against the possibility of suddenly losing your job. But once you clear all that and find a bit of professional success, you're still not necessarily secure.
So you have to extend this hedging behavior further out. Keep building your skills, expand into other fields so that you are more employable. Complacency will put you into this position eventually, it's just a matter of time.
Don't leave a secure position to take one with more earning potential but less security. Constantly keep building bridges at your current job and don't give them a reason to fire you.
Above all, try not to hate your job. You may find 5 years down the road that it was the best thing you had going for you. As nasty as the work world can get, it's better than not working.
Building bridges != being a loyal employee.
Pull your weight and support the people around you but don't grovel to your company! You're a free-thinking human being with value creating skills!
Masking how you feel and trying to work the system will only lead to regret. Find out who you are and what your principles are and stand by them, only then will you be able to live with yourself when you get old.
Also work can happen outside of the bounds of a company. Your post makes you sound really burned out, I hope you're doing ok = )
That's rather depressing to hear. I think it is a question of how you rate yourself (objectively). If you're good, you can go on to found the biggest hedge fund of all time (Bridgewater). If not, then yea, I think yours is the way to go.
Eh, I wouldn't look at it that way. Avoiding complacency and building bridges is just as important for those with healthy egos as it is for those with weak ones.
In my view the entire problem is that developers in general have been brainwashed into beliving that they are better off dealing with recruiters when in fact the best thing they could do for themselves would be to do their homework, that is, research companies that are hiring, figure out who to contact, and write a personalized introduction email.
If you do that then you have two things in your favor already..
1. you are cheaper to hire because there are no recruitment feeds associated with you.
2. you showed some initiative to zero them out, and you demonstrated that you have creative writing skills which are an important trait in software development
These are the bread and butter tactics of What Color Is Your Parachute. Still a relevant book, even in the tech industry IMO.
Finding engineers is soooo hard! There are no good engineers!
Translation: "There are no good engineers who will work for the price I'm willing to pay, either in terms of initial dollars or time to retrain."
As the realtors I worked with used to say about houses, "there's no problem that price won't fix", and that works for labor as well as real estate.
And their advice is "take one for the team" because there are managers trying to control costs.
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David "Pardo" Keppel
If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.
This is a surprise, said no one ever.
Sometimes companies will pay for experience but often they'll hire someone younger who screws up more because they cost less.
They might think it costs less, but I argue that's misleading. You need to factor in the mistakes, the longer training, slower adaptation, inefficiency, and a client's growing dissatisfaction with the product because of it all.
I don't think it's misleading. Companies know mistakes cost money and experience doesn't always associate with better productivity.
Most companies don't have a inkling of how to actually measure productivity.
To be fair, neither do most employees. It's a hard problem.
Companies that hire like this will typically be the first to layoff employees when shareholders are not happy. They often struggle to meet customer expectations over time. This is particularly true if they have never ending layers of management going up the chain. That's why startup culture is so appealing to many.
If you buy at Walmart prices, expect Walmart quality.
I recently found myself in a stale role, and hence I've been job searching lately, so I have recent experience. From my anecdotal experience, the local job market is hot for my skill set, so I'm looking for a 10% raise. I've gotten 3 offers from 3 companies. Two would not come up to my required salary so I walked. The third came up, but it was a W2 at a contracting shop, and wasn't too appealing for a couple of reasons. So I passed on that as well. I still get pinged multiple times per week, sometimes for the same job at the same company I've already turned down, which I find a bit amusing.
Now I'm continueing the search, but openly talk about what I'm looking for salary wise, I've wasted quiet a lot of my own time this past month.
Moving from engineer in financial industry to engineer in "regular" industry (same city) I just accepted and told potential employers I expected a pay cut. Sooo much money in finance, everyone is "over" paid.
I'm in finance and looking to get out. Why did you move?
Nothing to do with industry. I was in a more or less dead end devops role. I wanted more of a pure programming role.
The tendency to talk about salary upfront is a good one for both sides - it avoids wasting everyone's time when the expectations simply don't align.
It does need to be mutual though. I expect employers to include some salary guidance in a job ad. And if they claim to offer market rates, I expect them to live up to that.
At some of my recent employers, for a couple standard roles, we have a single job profile but the expectations and salary are scaled with their skill level. Generally we combined their years of experience, skill level (based on interview) and current salary to derive an offer. So we would take the years of experience to get the base range, use the skill level to adjust within the range, then compare to current salary to see if we were fair or not. From there, the candidate is free to negotiate.
The problem would occur when someone had lots of years working but their skill level is below par. Basically people who have done a narrow set of skills over the years and haven't broadened their knowledge. If we give them a low salary, it would be insulting and if it is too high for their skill then it would be unfair to some of the current employees (salary inversion.)
> It does need to be mutual though.
No it doesn't. The hiring company needs to be upfront, but the candidate doesn't. The company has a budget range set for the position whereas the candidate is asking the question 'Am I willing to do this job for the money they are offering me.'
Disagree. Most of the time the company could in fact pay 2x what they thought was the top of their range for an exceptional candidate. It's a rare candidate who's in a position to take an exceptional job for 1/2 what they thought was the bottom of their range.
It's strange to me that US job ads don't state the wage being offered.
In the UK a ballpark pay figure is normally expected information
Depends on the industry, I see lots of management/marketing/bizdev job postings which just say something along the lines of "competitive salary offered", including roles where you'd guess the salary might be £20k or £150k.
'no one states salaries, but trust us - ours is competitive!'
I did something sort of crazy when the last recruiter asked me about my salary. I lied.
The number I told him I was being paid at the time was actually the number it would take for me to leave my job. He came back with an offer that was slightly higher than that and I accepted.
Perhaps that's not the best idea?
Sigh, paywall
Text:
After more than 20 years as an electronics engineer, Pete Edwards reached the low six-figure pay level. Now, as he looks for a job following a layoff, he finds that salary success a burden.
Although his experience includes the sought-after field of 3-D printing, the 53-year-old hasn’t been able to land a permanent full-time job. Time and again, he says, employers seem to lose interest after he answers a question that they ask early on: “What was your last salary?”
That question comes up sooner than ever nowadays. Hiring managers used to broach salary history or requirements only in later stages, after applicants had a chance to make an impression and state their case.
Today, pay increasingly is mentioned early in the process, either as a required field in online applications—which are used more often—or during initial interviews, say recruiters, compensation consultants and job seekers.
The shift is vexing applicants, mostly those of a certain age and pay level, who are concerned that a salary they worked to attain now gets in the way of having a job at all. “I’m unemployable now as a result of getting to the top of the tree,” Mr. Edwards lamented.
ENLARGE Josh Rock, a recruiter at Fairview Health Services, a 20,000-employee health system in Minnesota, said that during the last recession, recruiters used compensation queries as a quick way to cull the large numbers of candidates for open jobs. The habit has stuck, he said. “Why not figure out what’s going on sooner in the process than doing a dance?”
Human-resources executives say asking about pay right off the bat helps contain compensation costs, ensures that candidates have reasonable expectations and spares recruiters from chasing prospects they can’t afford.
“Unfortunately, some clients use salary as a pre-screening question,” said Susan Vitale, chief marketing officer at iCIMS Inc., a provider of recruiting software in Matawan, N.J. “So if the role tops out at $55,000 and they say they want $60,000, it might knock the candidate out of consideration” even if the person would be open to salary negotiations.
Screening candidates this way may be a factor in wage stagnation, some analysts suggest. Average hourly earnings rose 2.5% in 2015, modest by historical standards. Wage growth has averaged only about 2% for the past five years.
Focusing on compensation history “holds down wages because now the jobs are being filled by people with lower salary expectations,” said Thomas Kochan, a professor of employment research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. “We have a whole generation of people who are permanently adversely affected.”
ENLARGE Though hiring tactics have received little attention in the economic debate about wage stagnation, Mr. Kochan said they could have profound effects: “The decisions of firms individually are…creating collectively this macro phenomenon of stagnation,” yet are hard to measure because they are shrouded in secrecy.
U.S. employers continue to hold the line on wages despite six years of economic recovery and an unemployment rate of 5%. Finance chiefs are “probably looking ahead and saying they want to keep the escalation of labor costs from going up in a way that will put pressure on earnings,” said Ajit Kambil, global research director of Deloitte’s CFO Program.
In Deloitte’s most recent quarterly survey, 47% of chief financial offers said they plan to work to lower or control labor costs this year, by taming compensation growth, reducing benefit costs or other means. Moreover, employers may feel they can lowball applicants because they believe there is still a surplus of qualified candidates.
“Workers are still a little discounted” in most fields, said Linda Barrington, executive director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University’s ILR School. “Employers won’t pay what the last person in the job was paid because labor is now on sale.”
Steve Carpinelli recently applied for a public-relations position with a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. The role called for a minimum of five-to-seven years of experience. He has more than 14.
RELATED
How to Field Questions About Salary Expectations Mr. Carpinelli’s pay reached high five figures before the 45-year-old switched to the generally lower-paying field of nonprofits. While preparing for a phone interview with the Washington organization, he discovered that the last person in the job earned $101,000. So when asked early on about his salary expectations, he put his range squarely around what the last employee earned, seeking $85,000 to $110,000.
“After that, the conversation was very robotic, not a two-way conversation about what they’re truly looking for,” Mr. Carpinelli said. “I definitely got the impression that I’d priced myself out.”
In his experience, “there has been a definite shift or emphasis on beginning the conversation with: ‘What is your salary range?’” Mr. Carpinelli said. “I was always told you never talk about salary until you’re given an offer. But I’ve noticed the salary-range question comes up far earlier in the conversation.”
The organization ultimately hired a young woman with five years’ experience. Mr. Carpinelli is still looking for a permanent job.
Older job seekers sometimes see such outcomes as evidence of bias. But “employers can make financial decisions and it’s not necessarily age discrimination,” said Raymond Peeler, a senior attorney-advisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “What an employee would have to prove…is that the employer is using the salary level as a proxy to disqualify all the older applicants.”
Businessolver Inc., a benefits-administration firm in West Des Moines, Iowa, recently hired more than 100 people for its Denver office. Human-resources staffers ask about compensation in the middle of a six-step hiring process and use the answers to gauge applicants’ “level of reality,” said Marcy Klipfel, senior vice president of HR. “A lot of times what you’re looking at is are we going to waste time and get to the end of the process, and it turns out the person is way out of our range?”
A majority of workers take a salary cut when they get a new job after a stretch of unemployment, but those over 45 usually take a bigger hit than workers under 35 years of age, according to research from Ms. Barrington and a Cornell colleague, Hassan Enayati.
A survey by AARP last year found that of job seekers between 45 and 70 years old who found work after a spell of unemployment, nearly half earned less than before.
Some employers hesitate to hire at far below a past salary, concerned that the employee would resent earning so much less. “If someone wants $100,000 and settles for $75,000, they’re not going to be happy,” said Steve Gross, a compensation specialist and senior partner at consulting firm Mercer.
Workers, however, say they would like the chance to decide for themselves.
“The presumption that I would walk into a job and get $150,000 is not there,” said Rosemary Lynch Kelleher, a baby boomer who has earned at that level during her 25-year career in international trade policy, and has been looking for a permanent job for several years.
“I realize very clearly that it’s not there. And I would take something for $100,000 or $75,000.”
In Austin, a woman who lost her six-figure position as a data architect in 2014 but recently landed a job, said she had been tempted to say she earned $60,000 to improve her chances of getting hired.
While she was searching, the 63-year-old said: “I hate putting down what I want” in salary. “If you put down too much, they think you’re expensive. If you don’t put down enough, they think you’re undervaluing yourself.”
Much of this ambiguity could be avoided if employers published a pay range for positions, but they don’t want to tip their hands. So experts suggest job seekers research market rates for particular positions and try to finesse salary questions.
“Say, ‘I’m open to a salary commensurate with the job,” recommended Blake Nations, a former recruiter who was laid off and then founded Over50JobBoard.com. “And if they keep going, ask: ‘What do you expect to pay someone with my experience and education for this position?’ ”
Some applicants, faced with a salary-history question they fear would exclude them from the start, have toyed with putting a bogus number in a required field in an online form.
Mr. Edwards, the electronics engineer, says he tried that once. Not hearing back from the company, he contacted its HR department and was told he was too expensive. That baffled him because he had listed $1,000 as his previous pay. It turned out HR had changed that to $100,000, assuming it was a mistake.
"ensures that candidates have reasonable expectations"
"a quick way to cull the large numbers of candidates for open jobs"
"holds down wages because now the jobs are being filled by people with lower salary expectations"
"U.S. employers continue to hold the line on wages"
"looking ahead and saying they want to keep the escalation of labor costs from going up in a way that will put pressure on earnings"
"47% of chief financial offers said they plan to work to lower or control labor costs this year, by taming compensation growth"
gauge applicants’ “level of reality"
Very interesting language in this piece.
Between culling applicants, testing their level of "reality", taming their unrealistic expectations, and holding the line, I think we can speculate that perhaps CFOs are panicking about rising wage pressure, using propaganda pieces like this one to reassure themselves, and trying hard to pressure applicants to be "realistic."
If employers want to try to save money by flying budget instead of first, they should be encouraged to do that. Maybe eventually they'll understand how that works out for them.
thank you!
Piracy on HN. wags finger
I copied and pasted the link into a private window (Firefox) and it worked ok, just FYI for anybody that wants to read it like I did. Searching for title and clicking through Google didn't do it for me this time.
Didn't work for me. Neither did the google link thing. Wonder what's going on here. :(
Neither did the browser extension "Wait! Google sent me." which was built just for these paywall sites.
It looks like Google stopped punishing journalist sites that do this, or the sites don't care anymore.
I think Google has some sort of "push" system for publishers to use now.
Since the google thing doesn't work anymore, I deleted my cookies and it worked like a charm.
Click the web link below the title, then click the story in the google results. Pay wall goes down.
Actually it doesn't. WSJ seems to have closed the google loophole.
You're right! Even a Google search in an incognito window didn't work.
That's weird, worked for me.
Your WSJ cookies don't reflect enough prior access or were cleared.
try opening in an incognito window.
Is this something that's unlocked with karma? It used to confuse me every time someone mentioned it; it just wasn't there for me. Today, it is.
The google trick has worked for me in the past, but it doesn't seem to be working now for this article..
I think they are dropping a cookie when you visit and hit the paywall then try to access the article through Google. Incognito works.
Did not work for me.
Clicked link on mobile, chrome, and got me in. Thought that was strange since its WSJ.
Incognito
I am only ever in the market for co-founder jobs, and not really looking at the moment, because I really like my current co-founder job. Besides good domain knowledge, and preferably an existing customer base, the non-technical co-founder will need to find enough money for the startup to survive until the inflection point. Otherwise, they are 12 in a dozen. If a potential non-technical co-founder wants to save money by not paying enough, it is quite easy to cut the discussion short and to move on to another candidate -- entire websites full of them. There is really no shortage there. Lather, rinse, repeat. Salary history? Sounds like a ridiculous concept. I don't even remember my previous salaries.
Wow, madness. So before we were told not to ask the question in interviews; but suddenly it's ok to be asked the question in interviews.
For me it's definitely negotiable. If you can't afford me then after negotiation then any gulf can be made up with a guaranteed longer contract or shorter hours; it's as simple as that.
Disqualifying off the bat is stupid, especially as some places pay extra because they need someone urgently for a short period.
Interesting discussion here about whether candidates and companies should reveal their range up front. Personally I would not quit freelancing except for something really exceptional, so I lean toward talking numbers immediately. That saves my time, but I feel like it's actually pretty unreasonable. In the freelancing world, we suffer from a "market for lemons" situation where the bad freelancers hurt everyone's rates. To charge a premium rate you need prospects to trust you a priori, which probably means referrals. I suppose candidates for full-time jobs suffer the same thing: asking for an "unrealistic" salary at the beginning of the process, when you are an unknown, just gets you thrown out. I suppose the way around this is to have an insider who will vouch for you. Any other advice on being able to ask for a high salary and not be dismissed?
I think it's more about company margins/culture than it is about them not dismissing you.
Some companies are willing to pay top dollar, others are more interested in getting someone in their range, so name your price and move on if they blink.
“I’m unemployable now as a result of getting to the top of the tree”
This shows a lack of understanding of the market and poor self-awareness for someone who claims to be at the top of the tree.
The average company is looking to employ someone who will do the same job cheaper.
In order to earn more, it's necessary to identify employers who are willing to pay a premium for convenience or for an unusually skilled or experienced worker, and be aware of those before getting laid off.
This man seems particularly aggrieved that he lost a role to a "young woman with five years experience". A white man should not and does not automatically trump a woman - if he costs more (which he doesn't actually know for sure) then that's his problem.
This is why for every thing I learn in IT/computer, I angle for a skill that I can use in freelance or 1-person company. Not interested in some proprietary skill that requires expensive hardware to stay current. Such as Cisco or storage stuff.
The article doesn't really address it directly but they seem to be mainly talking about people who are looking for jobs who are currently _unemployed_. They are in a position of weakness when it comes to looking for a job and especially when negotiating salary. I think this has way more to do with that than any alleged trend of talking about salary up front. It's been the norm for decades to ask framing questions about salary early on.
I find recruiters hurt this more than help it too. If you tell them your last salary, they'll just try to get enough % more to make it worth the transition.
That's what I don't tell anyone what my previous salary was. I am looking for X dollars per hour, do you have anything for me in that range? Yes or no...
That's it. I'll generally let them know it is open to negotiation as well.
Why not tell them an imaginary salary then?
>Why not tell them an imaginary salary then?
Indeed.
After all, some companies suddenly become "flexible" once they find a candidate who really blows them away. Their alleged "top range" becomes malleable. So their range can be imaginary as well. In the information war that both sides are waging, similar tactics can be used.
IMO the whole situation could easily be avoided if employers provided salary ranges up front. I heard that's what they do in Japan, and several recruiter pings I have received from there did contain the ranges. Alas they were too low to justify the aggravation of moving to another country, but from what I can tell, they were very respectable by Tokyo standards.
As someone who keeps getting more and more money, I find other limit as well. Your only job is to be in-demand and don't tell recruiters everything. Let them tell you, how much they can get you (and this is often bull, so think and research).
TL;DR people who are unemployed aren't willing to take less than 100,000 a year and feel like the system is screwing them?
Off topic, but I've said I won't answer it because of commercial in confidence reasons before.