I don't know why I don't act in my own best interest though. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some societal element to it, but it really seems strange/weak/victim-ish to blame something external for what really does feel like a personal shortcoming - after all my own sister doesn't seem to have the same sort of "conditioning".

Are there tips out there to help getting over the fear of negotiating? Not really thinking about looking for something else at the moment, but there always seems to be a "next job" out there somewhere.

Don't worry, even the big toughguy negotiators had to learn the process and were afraid of it at some point too. I've negotated 50% increases at three different employers (two during intial hire, one as a raise) and it didn't come to me naturally. There was no magic testosterone gift that made it easy. The guy across the table is just as worried as you are.

re: socialization factors I blame the school enviroment where grading is fair and you ostensibly get the grade you deserve. This normalizes the behavior of 'just do good work, and you get the pay/grade you deserve.' Kids that wheedle the teachers for an A- when they deserve a B are reprimanded. In the real world it's completely different. Managers will give you a D everytime if you let them.

professors would get very squeamish and often bump my grade up (from a B to an A-, for example) on the spot.

So I divide it into two sides: negotiating to get more that what you 'deserve' (which they can categorize as unfair/wrong/evil etc..) and negotiating to get exactly what you deserve. They start out believing that all negotiation is the first type. Introducing the second type makes it easier to rationalize negotiating for what they deserve, and that it's not 'that other unfair type of negotiating'.

My basic negotiating stance was “I appreciate what you guys have done so far to get me an X% raise in this cycle, and I hope you can use this information to convince the corporate higher-ups that I deserve more.” The managers were sympathetic but made no promises.

And four months later, I got a call from my manager telling me that I had been approved for a 10% off-cycle raise.

There are ways to be more hard-nosed and get even more, but as you can see, simply knowing what you are worth in the marketplace and articulating that value can go a long way.

  >> 10% off-cycle raise.

Argh! This kills me inside.

>Are there tips out there to help getting over the fear of negotiating?

It's the same with asking someone out.

The worst that can happen is they say no, and if they make such a big stink out of it you were better off with someone else in the first place because they are douchebags.

My theory goes that men as a rule of thumb have more opportunities to get into LOUD OBNOXIOUS arguments with someone who is SO WRONG that you can't let it stand. Somewhere in that process you learn to push a few boundaries. We're just conditioned to be/are naturally more aggressive.

Seek situations where you can practice negotiation where the stakes are lower than 25% of your earning for 1-2 years of your 50ish-earning-year life (pretty easy to do).

Keep in mind that countering is not personal - you are both seeking your interests, which will rarely be totally in common.

Keep in mind, also, what the best alternative to agreement is. If you shoot too high, they will either come back lower, or say no, or go silent. What is the next step? Seek another opportunity. That is a much better alternative than accepting well below your potential (presuming you have savings or otherwise security).

Avoid getting into negotiation situations where your best alternative is bad, even unacceptable. That is when you will be forced to take the worst deal. It is generally avoidable, so plan ahead.

But above all, practice. Doing it once every 1-5 years with high stakes is a great way to fold or go all in or otherwise poorly play your hand.

I totally agree about taking personal responsibility.

However, when it's also a reproducible difference over a large set of people then it's worth looking for systematic causes and working to address them as such.

Their earlier book "Women Don't Ask" is well worth reading too.

I second the recommendation, the books are both driven by the authors' research & real-world efforts (Babcock is an economics professor at Carnegie-Mellon, Laschever was a research associate for Harvard's Project Access interviewing large numbers of scientists about their career experiences) and take a really pragmatic view. Somewhat unusually for books about negotiation the authors actually discuss the relevant research (including Babcock's own work) in ways that don't make me want to bang my head on the table. These are definitely not would-be self-help gurus skimming a few papers and mostly repeating third-hand stuff from other people's books.

One of the most interesting things for me about the books were that they go into other people's gender-based _responses_ to negotiation strategies, not just addressing the negotiator's behavior. The really frustrating part is that responses to women using the same techniques in experiments (or even the exact same written scenario with just a name change) got significantly more negative responses than the men... BUT they did still see an overall boost in the outcomes. Asking for it isn't going to make the bias go away, male candidates will still be treated better on average with exactly the same strategy, but it's worth pushing because it pays off.

I'd highly recommend both books to male tech people as well - the situation is a lot better for you, but some of the same issues do apply and it'll pay off.

Put yourself in situations where you can negotiate - start with going to garage sales and negotiate the price of something.

It's like the cure for paralyzing fear of public speaking - start doing it. The fear will pass, guaranteed.

Start by practicing in situations that don't matter in order to gain confidence.

I'm tempted to say that the author is not suggesting that there is a proactive push on his company's part to take advantage of this disparity. You could argue that they are by lowballing everyone, but some fraction of the people end up taking the job so it must not be a totally bad deal for those who take the job and fail to push the lowball offer higher

My question is, what do you feel is to be done about situations like this? In particular, at what level should society act to 'right' the situation?

Edit : by disparity, I mean the gender disparity : There is not a proactive effort to get women to accept lower salaries.

I think everyone, male and female, should be more aware of the importance of negotiation when it comes to salaries and raises, so a good thing colleges and trade schools could do for their students would be to have some emphasis on that.

Beyond that, however, what can you do? Anything where the government tries to step in and rectify the situation reeks too much of affirmative action. At the end of the day, you are responsible for your own salary negotiations. I'm all for helping people be better at it, but I draw the line at any sort of active interference.

If we assume the problem is social (a behavior learned by participating in the society) then the next question is whether it's directly related to something specifically learned/taught or whether it's a result of a lot of different things that are taught.

My suspicion is that it's social and the result of a combination of many things. To try and reverse engineer society's beliefs to change that specific behavior is probably unlikely and perhaps we would be losing out on some positive behaviors in the process.

To specifically fix that issue, one would probably have to campaign and educate if you wanted a more 'free' solution. A more paternal solution would be mandating equal pay for equal work and enforcing it across genders.

I don't really know what the solution is, but I do know that I don't see an easy fix.

I like the idea of equal pay for equal work, but define "equal work"? In a factory job with quotas and quality control, this is probably pretty obvious, but once you step outside that realm it gets very touchy.

You could easily have two salespeople (and area where results are easy to measure) but where one works more hours and the other still sells substantially more. Are we measuring hours or results? And in sales we at least have a good measure for productivity, in programming it is often hard to measure.

For that matter, how do we define equal pay? I know people that turned down higher paying jobs because they liked some of the less obvious fringe benefits at their current job, such as having long periods on the clock where they could do their homework as long as they were there and ready when called on to work hard and fast. Is the ability to do homework on the clock a form of pay we should be counting? What about having a job where you go on business trips, but you get to go sight seeing in the evenings? Is the sight seeing pay? Someone might pass up more pay to get it. Or the fulfillment from doing a meaningful job instead of chasing money at any cost, or flexible hours.

An interesting recent study study studied the behavior of women when negotiating for themselves vs negotiating for others. When negotiating for themselves, they exhibited the kinds of behavior in the original link, ending up with salaries far below the men in the study. When they were asked to negotiate for someone else, however, they performed on par with the men. (link: http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/news/item/7223326/Role+of+Gende..., original: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/98/2/256/) And you know that oft-cited study that men think about sex way more than women? Well, they also think about sleep and food at about the same rate.. and way more than women. One way to interpret these results is that women are socialized to think less of their own needs (and to voice them less) -- and this is a societal norm that's heavily enforced with consequences for those who don't toe the line.

Think about how strong women are regarded vs men who exhibit the same behavior. A woman that does what she needs to get what she deserves runs the risk of being called a "bitch" or, at the very least, being thought of as unfeminine. Personally, I find fucking with gender norms an amusing hobby so I don't give a shit about the consequences.. but a lot of women aren't into that ;) Just remember this when thinking about possible solutions -- the root causes are way deeper than the appallingly patronizing "women need to be taught how to negotiate."

I think that most men who exhibit the same behavior that would get a woman the title of "bitch" fall under the umbrella of "sociopathic asshole". It just so happens that there's a lot more of those, especially in upper management, so it almost becomes the norm, and thus people don't complain about the status quo.

No one would call a man who said that a "sociopathic asshole".

Well, yeah - they put themselves out there and got swatted aside without a second thought. That's called a defense mechanism. Actually calling her a bitch is something else, though.

>No one would call a man who said that a "sociopathic asshole".

Sociopathic, no, but I'd certainly call him an asshole.

(After all, we males have never been known to retaliate against females asserting themselves in meaningful ways, particularly not when some aggressive guy's haggling them down. Patriarchy is actually caused by whatever's going on in women's heads, turns out. Men are neutral. Especially the kindly guys in the hypermale programming profession.)

The problem is his companies aggressive hiring practices and his willingness to follow them, not his applicants.

Like take "labor" costs (most of us here get called "labor", even if we're a privileged class of it). Lots happens behind the scenes to beat down things like collective bargaining, because they increase labor's bargaining power.

Of course, this assumes that the paternalists administering such a solution will actually get it right. If you listen to the proponents of such a solution, it becomes readily apparent that they won't:

"...social workers (a female-dominated field) are paid less than probation officers (a male-dominated field) even though both jobs require similar levels of skill, effort, and responsibility." http://harkin.senate.gov/press/column.cfm?i=222096

And this example has an obvious reason why pay isn't equal. Can one really expect the paternalists to understand the difference between a great and a merely good developer? Or front end vs backend, app vs systems?

Of the first page (after removing quotes) it only appears that there's one story about someone actually attacking a probation officer. But there is this nugget: Probation officer stabbed neighbour with garden fork at bonfire

Note, if you search for "social worker attacked" (with quotes removed) you get two stories on the first page about social workers being attacked.

So clearly being a social worker is twice as dangerous as being a probation officer. And they're far less likely to attack people with forks.

My guess is localization is tweaking your results.

Anyway, here is data. Law enforcement (which includes parole officers) and bartending have the highest rates of workplace violence, social workers aren't on the list.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/wv09.pdf

Do you really find the results surprising?

Even if we overcame the massive impracticalities in determining what we mean by "equal work" and "equal pay" for various persons in various jobs, such a policy would essentially punish success. Those with the ability and wherewithal to negotiate would effectively lose their negotiating leverage in the face of mandated wage ranges. Over time, this would hamper, if not kill, personal incentive to try harder and stand out from the pack.

Education, not mandate, is the way to go here. Rather than forcing salary bands on the general public, let's teach kids how to negotiate. Much of the current disparity between male and female negotiating prowess is likely cultural in origin. The best way to overcome that cultural difference is to teach women the skill -- not to punish the men who are successful at it.

Here in the UK, when you start a new job, they are going to want to see your P45 so they can deduct tax correctly. There is zero point in trying to conceal your salary. And if you have, ahem, exaggerated it, that will be spotted too (and counts as lying in your application).

So yes, find a different excuse, but find an excuse.

While a new employer will request pages from your P45, it is not mandatory to hand them over. You can send them to the tax office who will notify the new employer of your tax code. The instructions to do this are on the back, I believe (I recently got bored while processing a new employee and read it all! It was news to me too :-)).

I can only second patio11's point here. My salary expectations have doubled over the past few years by just shopping around and keeping my mouth shut about previous salaries.

Just because you're playing a game doesn't mean you have to pretend you're not playing it.

@rmc, that line "out of professional courtesy" is an excuse. The real reason is that you don't want to harm your salary negotiation.

Similarly a hiring manager will tell you that she has to have your salary history and can't possibly go above an arbitrary number because HR and the VP of IT just won't stand for it. Each gambit is equally misdirecting.

At my previous job, I was underpaid compared to the average rate for developers in my area, so I needed to short cut a decent payrise. I wasn't asking for an outrageous amount, but so the company who were hiring me didn't find what I was asking for too high to pay.

I don't know whether they actually ever checked my P45 for my old rate, I doubt it. That side is handled by the accounts/payroll department, rather than upper management. If the upper management were that concerned about the rate at which they hired me, they'd have negotiated down at the time, not once they'd hired me.

But you weren't.

Kinda like declining to talk about if you have kids during an interview. Sure the company likely will find out after you're hired if you have them, but you don't need to answer questions about it upfront.

It's excellent advice, and it really is important to keep in mind - some companies use this information not to just lowball you, but to ensure they stay "with the market" in their salary ranges.

Consider the salary a secret of your employer. You can give a range, but never tell anyone what you make right now.

Instinctively, I have a hard time giving out a range too. Mostly because I would tend to give a range centered around what I'm making, which I feel beats the purpose of not revealing the amount. Shifting the range to be on the higher side feels like lying or something.

Let's say I make $100k. Saying "I make between 90-120k" feels wrong to me, because I instinctively think to myself "well, this is technically true, but what's the point of giving a range if it's not accurate?" And even suggesting 90 would feel like a bad idea because I wouldn't want less either…

The other part is how wide should the range be? Too narrow or too wide and it's really useless.

It's not a lie and it gets you exactly what you want and need.

If they want to know what you are making now, you are making exactly what you stated above.

Since there's no way for an employer to compare their culture/benefits to another company's, it is logically unsound for them to consider your past paychecks. Remind them of that.

The other simple approach is to say, "You know better than I what your organization can do with my talent. I want to work were I am most effective. The salary and work product your company offers is my best way to estimate my impact."

But make sure you are realistic. What are your peers making? What's the going salary, not only in your field, but your area?

But if you can, get them to move first. It might get awkward but they are the ones that know how much they can pay.

My Dad's old rule was this: "You can afford a house that is two times what you make, gross, in one year. So if you make $80,000, you can afford a $160,000 house. If you want a bigger house, ask for more money."

Just be sure you're worth it. There's no shame in being good and getting a fair pay for it. The right company would probably still be getting a bargain :)

http://www.qv.co.nz/onlinereports/propertyvaluemap.htm

EDIT: OK, it's clearly not a good idea to even remotely suggest lying is a possible option, even as a counter to patio11's frankly far more risky suggestion. And perhaps in the name of building a better society this is the correct approach (and certainly helps prevent anyone potentially sabotaging their networking efforts on HN, which clearly is something I'm not concerned about). I hate dishonesty in general, to be clear.

However, my first full time job deliberately boasted about underpaying its employees. Luckily I didn't have to state my previous salary at the next job, just my expectation. But if they had, you know what, I would have probably have inflated it 20%. Why should my first job being underpayed screw me at my next job?

In my last round of interviews for a large bank, for a director level role, the senior managers expressed that I was "too honest" in their feedback to me and while I made it to the final round of three, that may have played a role in not securing the job. It may have also played a role in getting me to the final round as well...

I am 100% certain that by being honest on my cv I have lost out even getting my foot in the door to interview at some great firms I'd have liked to have work for. I much prefer to be honest, but in the short, medium and likely long term, I also know it has severely hurt my earning and career potential.

And I wouldn't measure your experience against others. You don't always know what they know. Maybe they do have more direct experience than you. Or maybe they get, but don't keep, those jobs.

You could always ask others you know to give you feedback on your CV. Especially people who've worked with you. Ask coworkers maybe. Or former supervisors.

I do know how much some of my classmates know because I've helped them do their work in their new jobs. After helping one of them for free for a weekend and finding it frustrating, I then had a well-paying (almost full-time) job for almost a year while I helped four of them do their "work" and teach them along the way, as they paid me to help them. Six months after I stopped helping them, as I had found a "real" job that paid better, all four had to find new jobs because of recent under-performance.

Inflating your salary a bit is just a negotiating tactic. Considering they are sitting across from the table, trying to screw you, is it going to look that bad that you're fighting back?

There's plenty of misrepresentation going on at an interview. Of all the things to fudge, previous salary seems the least unethical. I mean after all, the potential employer isn't compelled to match or better it.

That said, I hate to lie. But man do I see it happen often.

In fact, the hiring company's common insistence on focusing on base salary is a bit of a shell game, much like the classic four-square worksheet seen at a used car lot [2]. Once they can get you to agree to one number, they still have room to pressure you on some of the other parts of the deal. Luckily you can do the exact same thing to them by presenting a range of demands (base, bonus, vacation, perks) without tipping your hand and letting them know which ones mean the most to you personally. It's especially helpful to be able to weigh their benefit details against your current position without having to directly disclose your salary.

[1] http://www.beinggeek.com

[2] http://www.edmunds.com/car-loan/four-square-basics.html

Are the people who "can't" negotiate and who blackballed you living under the same paltry vacation package you were offered? I'm assuming you didn't ask about vacation until after they made you an offer. To do otherwise is to chase off a possible opportunity before they've committed to you. Once you've got an offer, recognize that multiple parties at the hiring company are committed to seeing the deal go through, so you have more bargaining power than you did at the "we're still deciding who our top candidate is" phase.

I would imagine the salary piece of that is intended for credit checks, not for the next employer. (If you are thinking "maybe they should only give it to certain people," people lie. Oh boy do they lie about who they are on the phone.)

I worked in HR for a while, so I actually am somewhat knowledgeable about this one (for once).

You can decline to say, that's fine, but don't feed us a line of bullshit.

I don't work for people who don't hire people who say things like that.

but don't feed us a line of bullshit

And I certainly don't work for people who refer to a candidate's concern for confidentiality as a "line of bullshit".

There are plenty of prospective employers who actually respect their candidates. Let's just stick with them and save everyone a whole bunch of time and trouble.

Alternately: "My previous salary has no bearing on this discussion."

Unless it's verifiably false. Which would be just as bad, and probably worse, than patio11's statement.

(Part of the design of patio11's tactic is that it isn't actually a lie: "I don't think it's polite to talk about stuff that feels like a private issue between my former employer and myself" is, itself, a fact.)

"My previous salary has no bearing on this discussion."

This is little better than saying "no". That's not merely somewhat abrupt and confrontational, but it also doesn't necessarily shut off the conversation. Instead, it could threaten to escalate the conversation. As your questioner, I can respond "but I think it does", or "tell me why you think so", or "yes, I tend to agree, but I have this form that my HR department makes me fill out and I need to put something in this blank". And then you have to keep talking. You don't want to keep talking.

People seem to be misunderstanding how diplomacy works. There's no requirement that a diplomatic answer be a direct answer to the question. Quite the contrary. The goal of the answer, in this case, is (a) to refuse to answer the question; (b) to hint, but absolutely not say out loud, that you understand what the questioner already knows, namely that the question was a deliberate, standard-issue negotiation tactic designed to place you at a disadvantage; (c) to politely refuse to overtly acknowledge point (b); (d) to draw an end to the conversation; (e) to end on a positive note and provide an opening to change the subject.

When I'm hiring, I want to find someone who will stick around a bit. Hiring is hard.

When I hire people for my consulting company, I consider how much I can bill them out for, and then how much I can pay them based on that. Their salary history is irrelevant to me, and their salary expectations are only important insofar as it's less than or equal to what I can pay (and that they're up to the job).

Obviously, as an employer, I'd rather pay people less than more. But I'm also in a business that requires skilled, independent, smart people, and those are pretty rare. I'd rather pay someone a lot and bill them out for a lot, than not have access to such people.

Asking for salary history strikes me as a sneaky way to ensure that you can pay someone as little as possible, and leads to similarly sneaky and/or dishonest behavior on the part of the candidate, as well.

Because companies will use this to offer less and take advantage of employees.

I would say that line, or something similar, and mean every syllable of it.

That you don't share my ideals of professionalism isn't particularly my problem.

What did you plan to do with the number he/she gave you?

Always do your research on similar positions at the same company or different companies through a site like glassdoor.com before even negotiating. You should not be going in blind. Also do research on how much people are making at a role that is similar to yours in terms of work / title / experience. Remember that if there are 2 same positions at a company or even in a department or a team, difference between their salaries could be big.

If you're asked to divulge salary history, don't tip your hand. I've made this mistake a couple of times and I have regretted it / having had to settle for a lower salary. If insist on you giving them a number, quote a number that's 10-15% higher than your annual salary (Have to be careful of the company not finding out your current salary through some other means).

Always tell them about the value you bring to their organization and your experience and that you deserve this much $ amount because of how much the future company will benefit from your skills. Talk about positive recommendations & performance reviews, performance bonuses, awards & accolades you've earned at your current/ past jobs or at school. Do not bring in a comparative number (this company is offering me this much) unless you really need to as it sort of casts a negative impression about you being all about money. Potray how highly you're interested in the position but you feel that the offer is on a conservative side as far as the market rate goes.

If they cannot offer a higher $$$ figure, and you really like the profile, you can negotiate better benefits like full health coverage vs. partial, higher # of vacation days (some companies allow you to cash out some vacation days at the end of the year), commuter benefits, etc.

Just be confident and do not hesitate to ask for more (as long as it's realistic and comparable to the going rate). Also, rehearse the negotiation with a friend or just simulate the conversation in your mind before you actually do the talking with the hiring manager.

Disclaimer; Some of this might not be right. Please feel free to correct any erroneous statements I've made. :)

This sort of reward structure strikes me as focused on short-term benefits, without regard to the long-term strength of the company. It's very sad to hear (and shows just how out of things I am, having been my own boss for 16 years).

Conversely, overpaying for hires is a way of focusing on the short term (to get the person in immediately) at the expense of the long-term profitability of the company (inflated cost structure).

I'm not defending this incentive structure for HR, just saying that there are a lot of factors at play whenever a hiring decision is made.

I promise, my opinion of this won't improve as I think through the further implications.

Is it?

HR strategy should maximize ROI and minimize financial risk regarding your team, but that doesn't necessary mean hiring someone for the least amount possible. Getting the best ROI and minimizing risk sometimes means recruiting the best possible employees and paying them exceptionally well to retain their services and keep them around.

This is also more likely if the person is a poor negotiator as they will be more likely to just find a new job when they get unhappy rather than ask for a pay increase.

For exactly the right definition of "retain", you're right. For most practical definitions of the word, you're wrong.

This is almost always wrong.

It is more normal for HR not to care about the pay at all - their concern is sourcing candidates, and often their performance metrics relate to candidates placed. In that case they are quite happy to see you overpaid...

We make the hire/no-hire and grade decision after interviews then the manager handles salary negotiation one-on-one. If a good candidate pushes the envelope we have to get Senior VP approval to go over the limit (rarely happens) or we try to make up the difference with stock grants.

Given the current challenges of hiring qualified candidates, particularly at the higher ranks of individual contributors we generally laugh at our colleagues who make low-ball offers to good candidates (and then promptly outbid them).

If you DO successfully push the envelope your subsequent raises will be small. We try to push everyone towards the center of their pay grade so newly promoted individuals (or poor negotiators) generally get a couple of good years of pay raises regardless of company-wide economics. People at the top end of the pay range typically get no increase at all.

HR doesn't own the salary budget. It is actually assigned by business unit (VP/SVP). If there is significant surplus then it just gets rolled up to hiring more people.

HR bonuses are partially determined by company performance metrics and partially by individual performance determined by their manager (based on what, the devil only knows).

If this is true, then this would be another reason that HR departments are totally useless. HR should be there to support the hiring manager in finding the best people for the job and should do everything possible to make them want to stay. They should have nothing to do with the budget besides their own.

I'm a big fan of anything written by Roger Dawson. Yes, it's written in sales-y self-help style, which you'll probably subconsciously resist, but the content is gold. Here's a link to his 'Secrets of Power Salary Negotiating':

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/secrets-of-power-salary-nego...

If it helps any, here's my absolute favourite justification that HR gave when I asked why they needed my salary history: it was, apparently, needed to figure out where I would fit in the org chart (you'd think that that was what interviews are supposed to determine, but apparently not.)

However, what I'm getting paid is still quite good and way higher than I was making... Partly because I asked for more during the negotiation. So I'm not upset about it.

For my next job, however, I won't be telling my previous salary, and I'll be using that 'I don't divulge company policies' line. I've never found it a good idea to tell people that stuff anyhow, friend or co-worker.

"Ouch! Sorry to hear that the world is tough there! I have never heard from anyone in media, I tend to only know about engineering/tech type jobs."

That being said, over the past twelve months, female candidates consisted of approximately 5% of the people I represented. There are very few women in the industry and I've rarely come across any who are afraid to argue their worth. On the contrary in fact. Occasionally I have come across one or two women who were demanding a salary that was simply far beyond their worth and I imparted the same advice to them as I would to a male candidate and both women were incredibly offended by my feedback and refused to budge whereas almost every single male that I challenged actually listened to my advice and adjusted their rate to suit.

The idea of negotiating salary offers still appears to be a relatively unknown phenomenon here in the UK. You'd be surprised how few candidates stand their ground and push for more than 5% of the original offer regardless of gender.

I can't say for certain why this is, maybe it was the role we were hiring for? The male candidates were more or less happy to move to us for the same price they are currently being paid where the woman actually asked for double what we were willing to pay for much less experience than the males.

That's why I like recruitment agents, when you apply for a job, you already know the salary (or at least the salary range). Obviously, there's disadvantages, like having no idea who you are applying for but that can be fixed with a bit of research.

It's a legal requirement in the UK for a recruiter to have your explicit permission to submit your CV to a company. The law is black & white but unfortunately most recruiters tend to be ignorant of it and those whe aren't simply ignore it as they know most candidates aren't aware of the fact. Never ever let an agent submit your CV to a company before they tell you who the company are.

Salary negotiations are incredibly simple. When you are offered a salary, simply push back and say you would be comfortable with 10% more. The worst that can happen is they will simply say that the budget won't allow it. The offer is still on the table and you've lost nothing.

There's almost always wiggle room - personally I've never accepted the first offer, and typically I've gotten 30%-50% more. Conversely, because I know there are people like me out there, I never offer the maximum I'm ready to pay - nobody has ever just quietly walked away if the offer wasn't good enough.

The only exception would be if I was hiring for specific very high level talent when the market is totally overheated.

> That's why I like recruitment agents, when you apply for a job, you already know the salary (or at least the salary range)

Recruiters are not your friends. While it is in their interest to get you the highest salary possible because it increases their commission, it is also in their interest to hire as many people as possible in as little time as possible, which means getting you to accept a lower offer if that's the quickest way there.

I am not saying not to use recruiters - I have successfully gotten got jobs via recruiters - but be very clear with them about salary expectations, and remember that just because a recruiter is involved does not mean the offer isn't negotiable.

On the contrary, if, when you get an offer, you make it clear you need more to accept right away, they will bat for you because they want that commission. Conversely, realize that they will at the same time bat for the employer if they think they can get you to sign right away. What matters to them is which side is most likely to cave.

Be nice to a recruiter and they also often will give you an indication of how far the potential employer is likely to stretch. I've several times had recruiters tell me "the instruction we got says X to Y, but I think they'll stretch to Z" where Z was a number I thought would've been outrageous to even ask for. In one of those cases, the company did in fact come back with an offer of Z after some strong hints + a very significant (far above normal levels) guaranteed raise at a specific later time.

Do practice interviews. Apply for a job you're not that interested in, and be actively unreasonable about what you ask for. You might sometimes find they don't think it's so unreasonable.

He voiced his opinion and it was a valid one.

There are lots of jobs and lots of workers to fill them.

In certain parts of the UK and moreso throughout Europe jobs are in fact quite scarce regardless of your development ability.

With one notable exception, all the women flagged "negotiate me down" signals harder and more often than the men. I asked, "So your salary ask is $X monthly?" And instantly returned, "Yeah, but we can talk about it..."

That just screams "negotiate me down."

I don't do it, because I want to pay my people top of market, have them think of themselves as the best, and build a culture of inspired performance. I actually negotiated that woman's pay up 25% of her ask (which was too low), but even with cultural considerations in mind in a high-margin high-dollar industry, it was still painful for me not to negotiate down.

To be very blunt and crass about it, hopefully for helpful illustrative purposes, it's like the guy who has a, "Please don't kick me" sign on his ass. You can restrain yourself not to, but it's painful.

If you're going to be their manager, it's in your interest to have their salary outcome have parity with other people doing similar work. Later on, if the employee gets unhappy with their comparative situation, it's much harder to fix a disparity with annual raises than it would have been to do the fair thing to begin with.

If their pay is too low, you have made yourself a persistent problem that will be hard to fix.

I've been struggling trying to explain the situation to myself but you nailed it.

The other option (while still at the original place) is to get an offer from another company. Then, assuming you have your manager's support, take that to HR and ask for an out-of-cycle increase.

Often by the time it gets this far, people are discontented enough to be at the point of walking away anyway.

I'm thinking 110K. He says 85K "but with some extra vacation that can be 80K".

Personally, I still offer the salary I think is right. But the lesson is: don't negotiate yourself down. Don't say "but I can lower that" immediately. Wait for them to say "that's beyond what we pay" or something.

http://www.womendontask.com/

'When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask."'

Incidentally, for a while, the authors would give a free copy of this book to women who would ask for one.

The professor's friend would always ask for discounts, everywhere he went. He would normally get a discount of about 10%. This was simply because he asked. His theory was that if he could get a discount, why not ask? It doesn't hurt anyone and you just have to get past the social stigma of "haggling."

So the professor's challenge for us until next class was to ask for a discount, or more simply "is that your best price?"

Some of the results:

A friend of mine got a free appetizer at a restaurant he frequents

At least 3 people found out that Taco Bell has a student discount program

One person used this in his salary negotiation (literally "is that your best offer?") and instantly got a 5K bump. He was going to take the job anyway, but got $5k more without any hassle.

Basically, we sell the same stuff via a variety of channels, and the catalog you have in front of you (if you're a regular customer) is systematically above the prices available to other customers like, e.g., schools districts, small businesses in California, people responding to our fall circular, etc etc. The actual software mechanism for this was a three character catalog code, which would cause the system to reprice everything when it was changed. If you were ordering from CAT (the big published book that 98% of orders came from, and you said the magic words -- canonically, "Can you do anything about lowering the price?" -- I would tell you that we had a competitive bidding process and, if you'd give me one second, the computer would come up with our best competitive bid for your business deletes CAT, writes BID ahh, I see we can knock 10% off the order)

There was actually a Bids group, but you'd have to be ordering office paper by the truckload (literally -- some people do) to be worth their attention. The folks in charge of things had long since decided that it was cheaper to just give 10% to anyone who asked than to involve the folks in Bids on $400 accounts or lose business because a law firm secretary decided to do price shopping prior to placing her order.

Of particular note: there is literally nothing you can say, starting from "You're placing an order in CAT", that would cause you to pay more money than the CAT prices. Savvy purchasing managers understand this, which is why purchasing departments almost without fail spent the extra 5 seconds asking for a discount.

AKA "The Atlassian Model":

Scott realized that to get adoption, the software had to also be inexpensive. This meant there was often no need to get approval from the C-suite.

Another key was the simplicity of the sales process. “We have a standard contract and there are no discounts,” said Scott. “We do not want to waste time and money on legal."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2011/06/14/atlassian-1...

I've done a fair amount of negotiating (on both sides) and to me saying that telegraphs "I'm going to buy but please throw me a bone so I can keep my pride".

I use the same technique in reverse to get a few extra bucks out of a buyer sometimes so as to not screw an already good deal (when looking a gift horse in the mouth).

Say someone is willing to pay $5000 for something and I would gladly accept. I don't want to loose the deal so I say "do you think you can do $5500??". If in their mind they have money on the table they will normally do the deal but it gives me the ability to accept the initial or latest offer if they won't. It's like a Rorschach test in a way interpreted differently depending on the mindset of the other party.

There's much more to pricing than just "you get 10% off regular price". It may come out that a company who replaces their computers less frequently, is more concerned about software costs than hardware, so we can adjust according to those categories. And, of course, in the realm of large customers, there are the licensing agreements that they negotiate directly with the manufacturers. So every one of our customers has a customized catalog reflecting their specific needs.

I happen to be responsible for the systems that maintain all this catalog data. Updating all of this (our master product list is well over a million products, multiplied by the costs offered for various customer types [e.g., education frequently gets a lower underlying cost] from all of our various suppliers, is a mountain of data) in a timely fashion, when our distribution costs and inventory levels change nightly, is a real technical challenge.

Yet when it came to salary negotiation for my first (and current job, I was too scared to ask for more because I didn't think I held any cards. I was fresh out of college with no internships and from a pretty mediocre school, and in an area with close to 0 software companies. I know everyone says that they won't take an offer away because you asked for more, but it felt too important to chance it. In the future however I don't ever plan on just taking the initial offer.

But yeah, in the future, look for a job while you don't have pressure and you can afford to be pickier and ask for more. (I did this, also.) You might be amazed at the results.

I agree that this makes sense for salaries and used cars, but if you do it for small-ticket transactions, isn't that like saying, "Hey, you can save a bunch of money as soon as you get past the social stigma against tipping 0%"?

What I found more troublesome was last week at a restaurant in Toronto when we used a gift card to pay and the tip was off the net charge to the credit card (when we'd calculated the % off the gross amount of the bill) and so the tip ended up being half what we'd expected. The server was noticeably upset and we didn't know why initially, and left wondering. In the parking lot we figured it out and couldn't decide to go back or not to give extra cash tip. But because we probably won't go there again (service and food was great, but inconvenient to get to) and no one had change they were willing to give up, we drove away.

I wonder why women do not ask more. Especially with something like dating. It happens but far less regularly than the other way around. I wonder if that leap of faith contributes to men being more comfortable to negotiate/ask for higher income.

When it comes to salary negotiations, most lower-SEC (socio-economic class) country women I know will counter their first offer. Getting more than the initial offer makes them feel respected; they want to see that the employer wants them enough to make a concession. Most higher-SEC urban and suburban women I know won't ask -- they'll take or turn down the initial offer, but they tell me that asking for more money would make them look whiny and high-maintenance.

Growing up in the country, being able to haggle was a badge of honor. One haggles (or at least asks about discounts/freebies) everywhere from garage sales to car dealerships to the local fabric store. I cannot tell you how many times as a child I heard my mother, grandmother, and aunts say "it never hurts to ask". It's considered mostly a woman thing there -- I get funny looks from the men for teaching my 8yo son to haggle, but my male friends ask me to come shopping with them to handle negotiations.

The women I know from the techie world (all from higher-SEC and more urban backgrounds than I) may look for advertised sales, but haggling or asking for discounts not offered is seen as showing weakness/looking poor. When I go ahead and haggle around them, they say things like "I cannot believe you just said that!" or "You are embarrassing me, we don't need a discount that badly, we can afford this."

As adults, we seem to translate that consumer experience to how we approach salary negotiations. Both groups pursue the strategy that they were raised to believe shows confidence and strength.

My advice: if you want your daughter (or son) to negotiate a higher salary as an adult, teach her (or him) to haggle young. That garage sale where she/he asks "If I buy all twelve of these books [marked 50 cents each], would you sell the lot for five dollars?" will eventually become "Would you consider 70k/year?" (in response to an offer for 55).

Places that play these kinds of games with salary really annoy me. For my first post-college job, as a DBA, I was offered $29,000/year (this was in 2000). I knew they had just lost key people and had a bad reputation for compensation, so I laughed and walked out of the room.

In the parking lot, we agreed to $65k + stock. Most of my colleagues didn't bother, and got stuck with lousy pay for a couple of years.

In the parking lot, we reached an agreement. IMO, it was the first time someone had walked out on him, and he got flustered. I worked in a busy sales job when I was in college, so I was used to dealing with his style. Once they start following you, you've won the negotiation.

Basically, his strategy for any purchase was to dramatically low-ball and act very important. It worked enough that he was very proud of it -- he would extract huge concessions from unwary vendors.

I personally do not believe this actually happened. Nobody will ever follow you out of an interview to beg you to take a job, or casually double a salary offer in a stairwell.

There is no "hard ball" negotiating like this where you walk out and somehow bring a company to its knees. It's just never that dramatic.

IF you receive a concrete job offer then you accept, decline, or counter. You should know the pay range by the time a company puts an actual offer on paper.

The guy went from an offer that was low-ball to an offer that was basically market-rate at that time.

With a big company, there's no way this would have happened. But this was company that was somewhere between "startup" and "mid size" business. They hadn't really adopted normal corporate processes.

There was no paper offer. I reported to work on a saturday (to get oriented by my predecessor, who had left the company already). My paperwork was on my chair, and I turned it into the VP's secretary on Monday.

On the other hand, I was paged 8-9 times a week to fix stuff. This came down once we fixed some problems, but it wasn't very good for my social life. I took off after a year.

    1. Hire women instead of men.
    2. ???
    3. Profit.

    ??? = Save massively on labor costs vs. your competitors.

Unfortunately, market interventions typically have the opposite of their intended effect. Rules that punish companies for paying women less than men increase the risk of hiring women; rules that punish companies for not hiring enough women increase the risk of interviewing women; rules that punish not interviewing enough women increase the risk of recruiting women. All of these factors, ceteris paribus, lower the wages of women. (Those who depend on the gender rage industry, on the other hand, make off like bandits.)

Where I used to work, this was a polite way for competent people to say "promote me or I'm leaving."

You get them to tell you what you need to do, some concrete thing, and then you do it. Once it's done, if you haven't been promoted then it's a good time to find another job, I think.

It also seems to imply that wanting more money is somehow mutually exclusive with wanting to continue working in your current job and/or for your current company.

You're also demonstrating another classic weakness in engineers, failure to recognize social capital. In asking for that information, you put management in the position of articulating their expectations, and when you meet or exceed them, it pressures them further to agree to a raise.

Management isn't just running some simple equation to determine your salary, they're exercising their own judgement as to what you're worth to them and what will keep you working there productively. That judgement can be altered through psychological means.

Obviously this is not true everywhere and perhaps it's not true even generally, but one should consider this before they put in years of work with only vague notions of an abstract raise sometime in the future.

Your weird worst-case scenario does not invalidate the point that there are tactics that can be used effectively in the general case. Life doesn't work like code, strategies don't need to secure against all conceivable threats.

I was, and the GP mentioned it.

I have worked at a 20-person "startup" company where otherwise intelligent engineers did work for years on intangible promises of wealth, often pulling 70-80 hour weeks, strung along by already-super-wealthy investors/managers who would drop hints about "something special" or "a piece of the pie" down the road if only said engineers could accomplish absurd request x by date y.

People need to be aware of the reality of this circumstance. The advice here is directed to people who are already too scared to ask for a raise; how long do you think it will take such inexperienced persons to recognize that they've already met the "Criteria for Raise" checklist several times over and still don't have a raise?

I've also observed an interesting phenomenon: people want to believe they have good leaders and will often make excuses for them. "Oh, they had to pass up my raise this year because the economy has been real tough, yeah, it's alright, I just need to be a 'team player' and next year I am sure they will reward me for my loyalty and sympathy". This actually happens. People should be talking about it, especially in a thread about people who are too intimidated to even ask about fair compensation.

I resigned after only seven months (things got progressively worse...) to get away from that ridiculous culture. They were on the verge of canning me for refusing to participate in their silly abuse. They replaced me with another engineer equal in naivety to the rest of them.

No, he didn't. He mentioned getting a roadmap, that doesn't imply years, it may not even imply a year.

That said, I'm afraid your worldview is so cynical and alien to my own that I don't think we can have a productive discussion. I simply cannot place myself in the shoes of someone who will assume everyone seeking a raise will behave so ignorantly.

Haha. I'm sorry, but I've watched people who believed this get milked for years and years.

>Management isn't just running some simple equation to determine your salary, they're exercising their own judgement as to what you're worth to them and what will keep you working there productively.

Versus what someone else who could do the same job would get.

Could you do that in tech to boost salary without changing jobs, by getting an offer and then asking your employer to match it? Or is the act of looking for outside offers going to get you a black mark? In academia it usually isn't, partly because it's often done with the tacit approval of your dean, if you do really want to stay and the dean agrees you're worth significantly more on the open market than your current salary. He/she might want to offer you a raise, but be constrained by policies and budget authorizations, while you presenting an outside offer opens up a separate retention-package process that frees up the ability to offer terms outside the formal advancement policy.

I've seen it done many times. When you set these goals that would be required to get a raise, you're going to want to set definite terms so you can know if you achieved it. Your manager is going to want something more fuzzy. They'll claim this is actually helping you because it gives you more ways to accomplish the goal. In reality, it means they'll always have a way of saying you didn't meet the requirement if they want to (they usually will).

Personally, I never ever work for someone else with the promise of compensation later.

And how is that the point anyway? danssig didn't say anything like that, he just said "If you want more money you need to change jobs.", and assumed the strategy in question would be blindly applied by an ignorant worker and result in exploitation. Do you have some insight that allows you to discern he meant something vastly different from what he said?

This is just because you don't do it enough. I used to hate it enough that I once sued a company to try and make them not lay me off. Now I change every 16mo-5 years and I love the interview part. I would never stay anywhere (besides my own company) for more than 5 years as IMO it makes you appear not very sought after.

>and my largest percentage salary increases have come without switching employers.

I find this very hard to believe. All companies have caps on how much of an increase you can get per year, per performance raise, etc. When you move it's mostly dependent on your negotiation skills (which get better the more they're used). The biggest raise I ever got in a company was during the dot com bubble (they were afraid we would leave). I got 28% (massive, massive exception to get this. Performance raises were the highest you could normally get and were capped at 15%). I moved to another company a few years later and more than doubled my salary. My latest move brought me another 40%.

>and assumed the strategy in question would be blindly applied by an ignorant worker and result in exploitation.

Everywhere I've ever worked was this way.

... whose criteria for success can be easily gamed by the evaluator in order to string you along. Well, that's the pessimistic view at least.

1. Testosterone promotes risk taking (http://goo.gl/s2gf4) 2. Men have more testosterone. 3. Salary negotiation is a risk game.

Now for the important part: this doesn't mean it's right. That would be the naturalistic fallacy, i.e. that because something is natural it must be o.k.

So, yes, absolutely combat this. Learn techniques to overcome the disparity. But do not, in a forum full of smart people, wonder WHY this is happening. The answer is obvious to anyone who doesn't mind unpleasant truth.

What makes it completely loony, is that I have been the manager, and I never looked at it that way. But yet, I assume everyone else has a very different view of things than I do.

I have to disagree with the concern.

There's a cost to hiring humans. People get sick, have babies, attend weddings and funerals and take vacations. Men take paternity leave, women take maternity leave. These are the costs of hiring humans.

In my mind, our company exists to turn a profit, but it also exists to employ human beings. Treating them like human beings is money well spent, not money wasted.

Developers in particular are rarely terminated individually for economic reasons. There's always something for them to do, some way to extract value from them. Companies don't usually start dropping good people until they're dropping a bunch of them at once, and usually deadweight layoffs have preceded.

My wife typically comes to me when she has "business politics questions" (despite that she's been working longer and more successfully than me.)

Most of things we talk about involve how to get something (usually work or money) from a client without seeming like they're bothering them.

I'm definitely in the "just matter-of-factly send them an email." She's more in the "I don't want them to get irritated by me contacting them" camp.

This isn't universal though. I've had two experiences where it's been reversed. One male I recently hired accepted a position when he knew money would be a problem and didn't bring it up even though it's a bit of a hardship for him right now. A female I'm in discussions to hire has told me flat out what her salary requirements are. I actually appreciate this kind of discussion.

I'm really not very good at negotiation, but getting a 15% raise just by asking? I'll be doing that again :)

My wife got a job and the employer glossed over salary negotiations with an "assumed sale" of minimum wage! I asked why she accepted that, and she said "There wasn't an opportunity to negotiate salary. They just gave me the 'standard rate'." She's not a meek woman. No one had ever told her that you could ask for more. With my help she got a 2x raise just by assertively asking for it.

She's bragged to her parents about it and I learn that her mother had never negotiated a salary or raise in her entire life. So I ask all my female friends: same thing, my mom: same thing, then my ardently feminist sister: same thing! It was a twilight zone moment for me.

The reasons why varied, but they could be generalized as an expectation of fairness combined with a small amount of irrational fear.

An employer is expecting that an employee is loyal, but nevertheless he's trying to noble the potential employee from the beginning.

But you would be dumb doing it the other way, right? Sorry, but this kind of smartness harms the whole society.

So all the humble and self-doubting people are getting less than the loud and playing ones. Sure, the loud ones are the better, more loyal employees, right?

But you have to learn to be louder! No I don't have to and I don't want, because I like it the way I am.

To this day I am bittersweet about this. I am embarrassed I never paid her what she deserved - and I should have, for she is an outstanding professional - but I am also happy I helped her transition from an dead-end job at an academic institution to a fast-paced tech company and that this transition had a very positive impact on her career (last time I heard, she had a team of kick-ass programmers solving some devilishly hard computer-vision-related problem). I left a couple months after hiring her, but it's still a great story.

Well... There are better stories around here, sure, but this is still a good one.

Sure we have sites like indeed and salary.com that can give you estimates for the position and you also have glass door that gives you some salaries in your area...but they aren't solid numbers.software developer" makes, is pointless since there are so many alternatives, a VB developer is going to be making less than a Python developer.

Same goes for glassdoor...sure the numbers help, but you don't know if the number you are looking at is current...or if it was added 10 years ago when the site launched.

So here is a startup idea...create a site like salary.com but one designed solely for programmers/developers. Then create an interface, where someone can build out a job description/location to get a good feel of what a fair salary would be for that specific position.

You're not buying a person though. In employer terms you're usually buying the completion of a particularly series of actions. These actions can be analysed and given a money value.

The Labour Theory of Value is not correct. 'Worth' is not based on how much you put in, but also on what the company is doing, and what their other options are. etc.

Things are worth what people will pay for them.

"Look, I've read all of the negotiation strategy books, and clearly you're an expert in your field, so let's agree on the value that I bring to your company and find the right compensation package."

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/02/she_m...

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-09-29/strategy/3007...

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/01/young-single-women-ea...

http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2010-09-01-single-wo...

There are still some statistics floating around that compare salaries without factoring in control variables (mostly based on generic census data), but these tend to be less accurate.

the one person who got the most out of us was a highly aggressive, very smart, very confident woman

I guess they wanted to point out women, in general, aren't as aggressive in demanding higher salaries. Which whilst being an interesting observation seems kind of a non issue, there is no discrimination here.

I don't see this as a gender issue so much as a personality-type issue, it's secondary that many women happen to have the personality-type where social concerns come first. When clients ask me for a discount we'll almost always give it, but I'll be much happier to work with a client who approaches the matter in a sociable way rather than a direct request for a discount (I find it tasteless, even though the money-brain side of me completely understands what is happening).

Just a side note: I have male employees who also suck at asking for raises.

I can't really speak to other fields, though.

A 30% cost savings on staff seems like it could be a huge competitive advantage.

If such a company exists, I would love to have someone point it out.

I remember when I worked at Red Hat, several years after being hired, I found out that there were people making half as much as me... it blew my mind. I asked for a lot when I got hired, more than I was worth, but I stuck to my guns and they gave me slightly less than I was asking.

The people who made half as much only asked for half as much. What manager wouldn't hire them if they were willing to work for half the salary? These were great people, too, by the way, they worked hard and were very skilled, but they were interoverts and were happy to take the "prestige" of working for a company like Red Hat as a sort of currency. Fuck that. Word hard, but don't aim low, ever.

My point is that these men are competitive and they have momentum and the current salary-negotiation-education strategy won't result in parity. I don't see any reason it has to be that way, of course.

Yes, I think it will go this way. A perfect fit is also the article about the neuroenhancers on hacker news. If you don't want to get behind, you will have to take them.

But what kind of life is this, or will it be in a even more competitive future?

If your self-worth is mostly based on making money or your career, than you will have to go this way.

But is this really the best possible life, the best spend life time?

If men are raised and "socialized" that they are the rightful leader of the family, and it's not only okay but right to hit their wives, we hold them personally responsible for their actions.

If women are raised and "socialized" not to negotiate, we blame society. Because… women aren't smart enough, or whole humans enough, to do anything but what they're told?

Ladies, take control of your own destiny, or be a victim of your own making. It's your choice.

When a large group of men all beat their wives because they were raised to think it's right, we start looking at just why so many men are raised this way, and see this as a larger problem. This is only right.

Same deal with women and negotiating: an individual woman who's a bad negotiator is her problem, a large group of women who are all bad negotiators is a problem with society.

Note that the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. In the cases of large groups with a problem, we can and generally do place blame both on society and on the individuals.