Picking up on a recent Interview On-Site Day deep dive, today covers the applied negotiating tactics you need to close the deal.
Let’s dive in.
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If you have the hand, bet hard
Like in poker, winning hands do exist.
Imagine you had what you knew was the best possible hand, a Royal Flush. And you stuck with your timid usual bet size, even though you knew you had a winning hand.
It’d be utter foolishness, sheer cowardice.
Job offer negotiations are much the same way, especially once you’re nearing the peak of your career.
New grads, unless they have killer intern or paid consulting experience as a teenager (yes, I knew a guy who was getting paid to program in his teens), will need to mostly settle for what they get.
But, once you have some years under your belt, your strategy must change.
Continuing to toss out timid small bets is a sure way to lose long term.
Especially in tech, you only have maybe 18 good years. From age 22 to 40 if you’re lucky. Past 40, you’ll be soon be shuffled out to management or laid off, the grey hair never lasts around the office.
By your late 20s, you’ll have 5 years of experience, but still have some youthful energy and ambition. Do not shortchange yourself by not taking advantage of your prime earning years.
Like a girl who comes of age in beauty and wit, but wastes a decade away to eventually settle for a B-tier guy, many in tech do the same wasting their prime earning years because they were unwilling or unable to negotiate.
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Would you hire “you”?
In your current role, you should always be positioning yourself for your next promotion.
Or, to have the project experience, public opensource credibility, industry notoriety, or technical skills that will let you improve your pay in your next job.
While I’ve long been a proponent philosophically of opensource software, and enjoyed the opportunity to be lead maintainer for some large projects at my big tech W2, even I underestimated the leverage it would give me when on the job hunt.
But that’s just me, for you there may be other opportunities that when you seize them could open doors down the road.
The key is to have an honest assessment of what you bring to the table. Drop the ego and evaluate yourself as if you were the recruiter, hiring manager, CEO of the company you’re trying to work at.
Would you hire “you”?
Would you be willing to fudge the RTO rules and let “you” go hybrid or remote-only?
Would you bump the comp to get “you” to sign?
Be honest. There should still be some small doubt, but if your and anyone’s reasonable, honest, true assessment is that you would be their top candidate for the year, then you must negotiate hard.
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Never split the difference
Life is a series of negotiations so you might as well get good at it. If you haven’t, go read the Chris Voss book.
Frankly, your negotiating position must be feasible.
You can’t go in too hot and ask for $100M / year. You’ll just get turned away like the lunatic you are (barring 5 people on the planet who could swindle Meta out of it during the peak of the AI bubble).
But, you can and should always be pushing your next employer to the edge of what they can accept.
The negotiations first start with the recruiter. For my most recent job, I was very friendly but firm that I would accept nothing less than
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