Salary Negotiation Tactics

[Mojo]

I wouldn't disagree that 45k was a damaging blow but I think you have a defeatist attitude if you believe there is no way to gain leverage. She offers much more to them than some random hire. Two years is a lot of time to get to know a place.

[Boyiee]

I wouldn't disagree that 45k was a damaging blow but I think you have a defeatist attitude if you believe there is no way to gain leverage. She offers much more to them than some random hire. Two years is a lot of time to get to know a place.

But saving 10k on a new hire is worth more than 2 years.

[Mojo]

But saving 10k on a new hire is worth more than 2 years.

Maybe, but probably not. If someone doesn't have enough self respect to negotiate for what they think they're worth, they probably wouldn't give you the results you were hoping for.

[bori]

50k is amazing, she should definitely jump on that. I got very lucky and got a job with a commute of less than 5 minutes and 55k salary last summer. I honestly was expecting around 45k offer, but was very pleasantly surprised!

[Kalmado]

Maybe, but probably not. If someone doesn't have enough self respect to negotiate for what they think they're worth, they probably wouldn't give you the results you were hoping for.

I have a friend who has been interning for an engineering company for a few years. We both graduate in May and they've been encouraging her to make an offer to come on full time. She offered herself for 45 which is outrageously low, I told her to ask her for 60. She updated her offer and they responded with an offer for 50. I still feel like it's way too low, the average is 58 from what I've read. I was wondering what the best way to handle this is. She's got excellent grades (3.9) and knows a lot about the company and had done a lot for them. I'll be in this situation soon myself so it's good to know.

Sounds like she doesn't think much of herself and should just accept the offer.

[Mojo]

She does have low self confidence, which I'm trying to help her with. She's a walking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect really (I'm not the only one who thinks this either.) Also, everybody who keeps thinking 50k is an amazing offer, you need to aspire more.

[archibaldcrane]

Also, everybody who keeps thinking 50k is an amazing offer, you need to aspire more.

seriously this too

[Blubbartron]

Aspirations are all well and good, but first thing's first - being able to take care of yourself and pay your bills. I was lucky enough to get an offer from an amazing company. They asked me for salary and I said somewhere between 35-50 minimum as an entry level programmer (economy was still in the shitter from great recession, for dime-a-dozen programmers with 0 experience, it was reasonable). They gave me 75. Shame her company isn't interested in being ethical, and only cares about the bottom line.

[Kalmado]

I get what you guys are saying about aspiring, but that's also a blanket statement and 50k may be huge for a lot of people. For instance, the household income in the city I currently live in is almost half that. Always aspire for more, but you have to start somewhere.

Estimated median household income in 2009: $31,654 (it was $31,294 in 2000)
http://www.city-data.com/city/Jackson-Michigan.html

[Necronus]

But saving 10k on a new hire is worth more than 2 years.

Fuck, where I work, they keep letting themselves lose people with 8+ years of proprietary knowledge and experience and then go through dozens of newbies cause they can't catch up in 6 months .... businesses be stupid yo. All because they only think about THIS quarter .. doesn't matter if the decisions affect future quarters or if they are a reminder of bad decisions in the previous one.

And my relevant philosophy to this topic is ... best place to look for a job is from a job. I rode 50k for a year to position myself for higher (computer programming / database in my case)

[Mojo]

I get what you guys are saying about aspiring, but that's also a blanket statement and 50k may be huge for a lot of people. For instance, the household income in the city I currently live in is almost half that. Always aspire for more, but you have to start somewhere.

Estimated median household income in 2009: $31,654 (it was $31,294 in 2000)
http://www.city-data.com/city/Jackson-Michigan.html

People don't excel in engineering school for four years to make an average living. You have ridiculously low standards.

[Kalmado]

People don't excel in engineering school for four years to make an average living. You have ridiculously low standards.

Where is there any indication I personally have low standards? That's right nowhere. Just go back to selling ffxi accounts to make up for lower wages instead of bitching about your girlfriend getting lowballed because she went to school for four years yet doesn't know how to ask for what she wants.

[archibaldcrane]

shots


fired

[Anakron]

Fuck, where I work, they keep letting themselves lose people with 8+ years of proprietary knowledge and experience and then go through dozens of newbies cause they can't catch up in 6 months .... businesses be stupid yo. All because they only think about THIS quarter .. doesn't matter if the decisions affect future quarters or if they are a reminder of bad decisions in the previous one.

I see this at my current job all the time, and it's because the people responsible for those stupid decisions aren't there when the shit hits the fan. They get to put a shiny bullet point about cutting costs and saving $$$ on their resume, and promptly get promoted or a new position elsewhere.

What I don't get is how this kind of thinking can permeate through the entire corporate chain. But apparently it does.

[vagus]

She was offered 50K for when she valued herself at 45K. The company didn't low ball her, she did that to herself. I'd get her to take the job. Unless you're from a community that has an overwhelming amount of positions for engineers.

[Tricen]

Where is there any indication I personally have low standards? That's right nowhere. Just go back to selling ffxi accounts to make up for lower wages instead of bitching about your girlfriend getting lowballed because she went to school for four years yet doesn't know how to ask for what she wants.

And suddenly Mojo's dick became rock hard.

[Kooldachio]

Jesus the responses are all over the map on this thread.

Sadly, this is probably due to the fact that very few are engineers here and it really does matter on the company itself, size of company, and region. Glassdoor is your friend, especially if its a large company. Do some research there. I am a EE with master's in a somewhat smaller field - Digital Signal Processing. I graduated last year and have many engineering friends with BS, MS, and PhD all around the US with EE, Civil, Aero, ME, Chem, and Bio. I've worked for two large companies, one as an intern (doing full-time work on intern pay, still angry about that) with Bachelor's while I went to school and my current with Master's. I agree to you, OP, that there are some very low expectations in this thread. HOWEVER, your friend sounds like she already screwed the pooch on her horrendously lowball offer. With that being said, if she is applying to any reasonable company that wants to hire her for real engineering work and not tech work, there is no reason she can't make 60K. And that's assuming my area, AZ, that is much lower on the region pay scale. Silicon valley pay scale could easily max at 70K.

Given her situation, she likely should accept at this point unless there are some BS max pay scale crap that won't let her advance salary wise or other extraneous factors I labeled earlier. But, at the end of the day, this is a shitty economy and having a job, even for an engineer, is a gift.

[Fairy-Killer]

I have a friend that basically got stuck in the same situation. Here at A&M, we have engineering career fairs at the beginning of each semester where 500ish companies come out and find A&M grads. Well, my friend worked for a company for the summer and ended up with a full time offer of 52k. She had until the beginning of school to accept/decline as they knew the fair was coming and forced her into accepting a low ball offer. She has some self worth issues also, so she took what was safe as she didn't expect any other offers. It's safe to go with what's offered, and if you chance it, you could end up jobless. Sounds eerily similar to what your friend is experiencing, right?

Going into negotiations, you need to know what your starting average is upon graduation and have a very convincing reason why you should be at that salary or above it. Companies will let you offer away and read it. She told them 45k after completing two years with them; she obviously offered herself down below what even a modest person would offer, and the company picked up on her not having much self confidence. They know they are low balling, but they also know that she will almost 100% accept the offer. You can't go into negotiations without guns blazing and confidence on high. Honestly, her starting should be 60k+, but because she didn't know how to run the gauntlet, they have her in a bad way. As for possibilities now... She would have to find a very convincing reason to get them to budge, as she has basically dug a hole. You can say the average is $58k, but why should you be making that? What makes you so damn special that you deserve that average or even more? Simply saying, "Well, they get paid this much, so I should, too." is not enough. If this is exhausted and they don't budge. She either has to accept it, or decline the offer and hope they get scared and offer her a better salary while searching for a new job. However, this late in the year, basically everyone worth a damn is hired and they know it. It's possible that they offer her a better salary if she walks, but it's a dangerous move.

For reference, I am a computer engineering student at Texas A&M and will graduate in May. I got a job starting at $66k + $5k signing bonus with little negotiations. The average here at A&M is $59k for a computer engineer like myself. I hope she can get something worked out without feeling like she got screwed. Starting a company feeling that way is never a good thing.

[Julian]

Damn.

To the other computer engineers on here making a ton of money, how's the actual work?

I'm currently making 43k/year, about to get bumped into a full time position where I'll get somewhere between 50~55k, but aiming for 58k. The difference though, is I have a lot of freedom with what I get to do, and I really enjoy it (I love my job.) Also, the stuff I do is a bit more pseudo-business/pseudo-IT mix of stuff, working with databases & extracting large amounts of data and making sense out of it/finding errors in billing, basically data mining & recovering a ton of revenue that the company would otherwise be losing because of their dumb software. I do a little bit of programming, but it's some really light internal web app stuff.

The initial plan was to work here for 1-2 years, and then move somewhere nicer once I have a bit more experience under my belt and can find something similar. But damn, with all the money writing software actually makes, I kind of wonder if I should just go back to what my degree actually "prepared" me for.

I'm pretty happy where I am, though. My biggest fear getting out of college was that I would be stuck programming 24/7 and hating my job.

[Fairy-Killer]

Well, I could have taken a job where I interned doing signal processing for a research company, but I decided to accept a job doing software consulting. I haven't started yet, but it seems to be fairly straightforward: Go to a company, find out what they need, and write software to solve their problems. As for the research company, it was pretty much code all day and learn new things about the hardware I was working with. Really enjoyed it, but I didn't fit into the crowd.