By Bahamut
I dislike this greatly, and it doesn’t seem like a sustainable path – if the market crashes, and his/her skills don’t match the compensation level, then it will backfire greatly & catch up to him/her.
I was able to boost my salary to $160k in 2 1/2 years from a starting salary of $50k, but through tireless improvement of my craft (self-studying, experimentation, and contributions to major open source libraries, including taking over leading development on one 10k+ starred project on GitHub), smart job searching, and being unafraid to walk away from offers that are too low. I never lied about competing offers, and about compensation, although I rarely will disclose my compensation in negotiations – if I do disclose it, then I am not afraid of walking away if the offer does not meet my criteria. The plus side is that this shields you more from engineering employment downturns, lets you do good work to genuinely improve the state of engineering, and opens up doors that are not available to most people – I get emailed about some unique opportunities that most don’t get to see. And this is not to say that I could not have gotten more – I have turned down $300k+ positions already (took less $ for better work-life balance & more vacation).
One friend of mine mentioned he turned down large offers in favor of 35 (!) vacation days & a solid salary in a low cost of living area.
One does not need to be dishonest to get the salary & benefits combination one wants – one just needs to be steadfast at attempts to deflect you from those aims (i.e. “But you only make xxxxxx amount” or “We cannot afford to pay that”).
See more about this article by clicking the link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234454
Bahamut comments on "Totally Honest Software Engineering Negotiations"
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