What do your negotiating skills contribute to an engineering team that they should be affecting your compensation to the same extent as your skill level?
> What do your negotiating skills contribute to an engineering team that they should be affecting your compensation to the same extent as your skill level?
Negotiating comes in a few flavors. One is in the form of a competing offer, which you could just as easily ask the same question: "What does a competing offer contribute to an engineering team that it should affect compensation to the same extent as skill". Of course, the answer is that competing offers don't contribute to engineering teams at all! But, if a company ignores all competing offers, it will not hire anyone who manages to get one. I'd guess competing offers correlate highly with being a successful engineer, so that sounds like a terrible strategy to me. They also serve as another form of vetting (like VCs piling on after but only after the first bite).
I think this question fundamentally misunderstands labor markets. They are, in fact, markets! Employees are not paid by the amount of value they generate (potentially over a million per person at FAANG), but according to supply and demand for the position.
Nothing. But the reality is that it's in the company's interest to secure labor as cheaply as possible. If Charlie had competing offers and negotiates better pay than Daniel who did not, this isn't discrimination. At least not discrimination on the basis of protected class, it's discrimination on the basis of competing job offers. Swap out Daniel for Danielle and it's no different.
Good negotiation skills = good communication skills. Communication is a skill that 80% of the engineers I meet don’t have. Don’t be upset that someone negotiated a higher salary than you when they were hired, you could have tried just the same.
I don't buy this. I've known a lot of people, especially from a south-east asian background, that are extremely reserved when it comes to self-advocacy wage-wise and still remain extremely strong and clear communicators in the areas that matter. Additionally various factors of neurodiversity bring this into an even worse light, being mildly Autistic can make this difficult to accomplish even if you're able to communicate well with the team on a day-by-day basis.
You’re right, being a bad negotiator does not always correlate to being a bad communicator. But being a good negotiator almost always correlates to being a good communicator.
I don't agree with this. I had a great salary negotiation, over the phone. It was all prepared, i had answers ready for me for the negotiation, prepared by my stepsister (who recently had a mission at a recruitment firm), she listened to the interviewer/manager, pointed me to the correct idea for negotiating, and i landed +60% of my old salary (loosing two vacation weeks, i only have 8 left, but still). Nothing to do with being a good communicator.
I did say “almost always”. Also you showed (somewhat morally ambiguous haha) problem solving and resourcing—two highly sought after skills.
Let’s also not discount the fact that negotiation is a skill itself, and you were learning from your stepsister who sounds like a skilled negotiator. If you had to negotiate another raise in-person I would bet you could think back to the cards and knock it out.
