Dagon comments on Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Thomas 07 October 2013 02:52PM

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Comment author: Bakkot 07 October 2013 03:51:07PM *  7 points [-]

I'm told, and quite willing to believe, that your salary has more to do with the five minutes of salary negotiation than the next several years of work. I am also told that salary negotiation is very much a skill.

As such, it seems it would be worth a fairly substantial amount of time and money to practice and/or get coaching in this skill. Is this done? That is, how likely am I to be able to find someone, preferably someone who has worked on the business end of salary negotiation at somewhere like Google, who I can pay to practice salary negotiation with?

ETA: I've read extensively about how to negotiate (though of course there's always something more). What I'm interested in is practice.

Comment author: Dagon 07 October 2013 05:57:02PM 4 points [-]

Note that the comparison (more to do with X than Y) isn't very helpful for cases where X and Y are not exclusive, and/or related. For this particular topic, the quality and quantity of work in many fields has a direct effect on your ability to negotiate for salary (for three reasons: your actual ability to positively impact the business, your confidence in asking for what you're worth, and your (prospective) employer's comfort level in treating you differently from your nominal peers).

Also, 5 minutes of salary negotiation is bull crap. There is no excuse not to spend dozen hours of research and have multiple 30 minute conversations every year or two. Of course, you should put the same level of thought and effort into other areas of job-satisfaction (commute, hours, duties, etc.) as well.

Comment author: SatvikBeri 08 October 2013 11:55:33PM 2 points [-]

Note that the comparison (more to do with X than Y) isn't very helpful for cases where X and Y are not exclusive, and/or related.

I find it helpful to model salary as

(value contributed) X (percentage extracted through negotiation)

in most cases. For a huge swathe of people a marginal hour in negotiation is worth much more than a marginal hour in contributing value. And "a marginal hour invested in Y produces more than a marginal hour in Z" is very useful information.

Also, 5 minutes of salary negotiation is bull crap. There is no excuse not to spend dozen hours of research and have multiple 30 minute conversations every year or two. Of course, you should put the same level of thought and effort into other areas of job-satisfaction (commute, hours, duties, etc.) as well.

I agree that you should be willing to spend a lot of time on negotiation, but would like to clarify that investing even an hour is often exceptionally valuable.