Gm thanks for the recommendations. I'll check them out and see if I can find a code sample in the next couple days.

In a related note what are some good code as craft/code quality resources?

This is magical thinking - it's not going to happen. The standard offer is almost always going to be at or below market and is nearly guaranteed to be below the range if you set the range aggressively. The main reason that hiring managers need to know your range is because they understand that the actual number needed to close the deal is almost always higher than the "standard" offer and often need to be able to justify this to someone else. If you're really trying to maximize the return here, just get multiple offers.

Who's they? The hiring manager's boss probably hasn't even looked at the resume. The moment any kind of decision is made, there's going to be some inertia.

Also, most hiring managers are not even really negotiating in the sense of trying to get to the lowest possible price - unless they own the business themselves, they don't even have any incentive to lowball you even if your asking price is low. If their standard (read: below market) pay for the position is 140K and you're asking for 130K, they are usually going to just give you 140K anyway. And if you feel that this is not the case, you should not work there. Last time I made an offer, I went more than 50% over the other offer that he was otherwise going to accept - and I think he would've been fine with us just matching them - because it's not a lot of money and we want to be fair. Lots of companies give raises every year without people asking for them.

This is absolutely not a standard sales thing. 99.9% of the time, the customer asks for a quote, the vendor gives one. The only time that this kind of gamesmanship is useful is when you're the only company in the world that can provide a given service and you can't really know the value of this service to the customer. Even then, the vendor usually has to give some kind of number first, even if they first spend a lot of time researching the customer and/or obfuscate the pricing to allow for adjustments later on. "We can't give you a quote, how much are you willing to pay" is almost never going to work. None of this even applies if you're one of many commodity developers that can perform a given job. Most developers are more like condos than famous works of art.

To be fair, this is the other common scenario where I think it would be theoretically helpful not to give a range first:

Your perceived market price may be much higher than what you're willing to accept. This can happen due to a massive downturn, or having experience of the sort that may appear more impressive than actually valued by most employers, or moving to a different field where people may discount your previous experience. But if you're in this kind of situation, you need to think more in terms of salvaging your career than trying to negotiate the highest possible salary.

But either way, I think framing this as a negotiating strategy itself is a mistake. Try not to treat anything as negotiation and when in doubt, be straightforward and honest about as much as possible. Don't overthink any of this - winning a single salary negotiation will not make a big difference but a generally dodgy attitude that stems from trying to win negotiations through subterfuge can do real harm.

Candybar, its pretty clear we have different base assumptions. For example, I think this is completely wrong. I've seen people hired away at clearly inflated market value. Could be because a company really needs to fill a role right away. Could be because they have a need for a specific technology and are willing to pay more for it. Could be because they don't 'properly' account for experience. And so on.

Not sure what that's supposed to prove. You can get above-market compensation but it's rarely going to have anything to do with not giving a number first. Some time ago, I had three offers that were "clearly inflated market value" - my comp was stuck around this level for almost 4 years afterwards - and the two companies that knew my compensation history and expectations made much better offers than the one that didn't, who had to revise the offer upon being told about the other two offers. This is despite the fact that my compensation was well below-market. Basically, my existing compenstation was X, my stated expectation was 1.5X and the initial offers I got from the companies that had both #s were 2X and 1.7X (revised to 2X), the initial offer I got from the company that didn't know was 1.5X (revised to 2X). And I had no idea what I was doing back then.

If someone's desperate and you have options, nothing about your salary history or initial estimate matters or is binding in any way. Just let them know that you're interviewing at multiple places and they will ignore your number if it's too low and go to a number that they think will close the deal at the rate that they feel comfortable.

Desperate companies that are willing to pay aren't going to lowball you even if they know your numbers going in. Companies that are going to lowball you based on your expectation and comp history are generally not the same companies that will make above-market offers.

To be blunt you've had 2 jobs and spoken to 2 recruiters - maybe your relative lack of experience should tell you that you might not be right here. There is absolutely no way that even "desperate" companies are going to offer you above market if they know your current salary is below market. They will offer you a "great raise" i.e. maybe 20% higher than your current salary - max. While if they didn't know your current comp they would pay you much much more.

Telling a company, literally or not, exactly what the minimum is you will work for is never a good idea.

I'm pretty sure I'm more experienced that you are - I've been programming for a couple of decades, talked to dozens of recruiters and received 10+ job offers over the course of my career. I've also been on the other side of the table almost as much and manage and negotiate salaries when I can't delegate that to someone else.

There is absolutely no way it's going to happen, except it happened twice over the course of two weeks for me, and something I do and recommend consistently from the other end. If I have a great candidate who is stuck with a well-below market salary, I will try to come pretty close to market salary because I'm not trying to win this round of negotiation, but trying to have a great working relationship with a talented developer over the long haul.

Grue, I think I've seen this before from you but what's with this attitude that everyone's out to screw you? That has not been my experience. Even average employers will not try to pay the employees as little as they can get away with in the short term - that kind of behavior is reserved for the worst employers, the kinds you should generally avoid.

But no one is saying that they have to give a minimum number - I'd give a range X - Y where X is my mid-estimate for my actual market value and Y is my speculatively high estimate. I will be honest about not knowing for sure what it would take because I wouldn't actually know - it would depend on how much I like the company and the job, how my other leads are doing, whether I have an offer, how my feelings about the current job have evolved and so on.

Also, I think what I'm calling "market value" is what a lot of you are calling "above market" because I think you guys are looking at salaries from the standpoint of existing salaries that people who aren't even negotiating are getting paid, when in reality, in a market like this, you need to look at newly negotiated salaries only.

Most people who are not aggressive during negotiations with existing employers are underpaid and seemingly overpaid new guys are getting paid merely fair market value. We're giving like 20% - 30% raises this year to people who aren't even asking to make sure talented people stay around, because we feel that some technical people are so shy about asking for raises and negotiating that they would rather get new jobs (where they can just take the offer) than ask for a substantial raise.

I can't help but feel that this is part of what's going on with this advice - not stating a number seems like just another way for people to avoid having to do the hard work and just accept what the other guy says. The actual IRL technical people I've met tend to be so averse to negotiation that I have a hard time believing that people here have somehow figured this all out and using advanced techniques. Money is not that important to me and I'm not an IRL good negotiator - probably above average for a technical person but average-ish for general business - but my boss who's been selling enterprise software for decades always wants me to advise on pricing and negotiating strategies so I don't think my understanding is that far off.

I'm not really interested in keeping discussing negotiation, but it brings me to a common problem I have.

I think most of these arguments (and possibly many in life) are based on the fact that we each have our own view of the world based on a really small subset often dominated by a (or a small number of) particular industries, experience levels, geographical areas, etc.

This comes up a lot for me because my experience is basically all been in small and fast growing non-finance tech companies in Boston/NYC but I live in an area with a much larger supply of developers and a relatively large portion of the tech market dominated by big not particularly sexy tech companies.

When I talk to my developer friends we just have totally different views of the tech industry. For example, we don't really talk about our absolute salaries but I think they'd be absolutely floored if they knew what I (and many US-based developers with our experience level) are making. Sometimes it kind of comes out tangentially and I don't think they really believe it.

So all of that being said, take any sort of general advice (even from me!) with a pretty big grain of salt.

^^ this and as usual I regret bringing it up.

I don't think people/employers are out to screw me, but they're definitely out to pay me the least they can to work and continue working for them. Thats fine, its their job, its my job to prevent that. Part of an easy to prevent that is to do your best to not give them numbers and I don't see any evidence that its not a good thing to do that.

Basically agree with what you're saying here. I think my last post captures my basic sentiment but my problem here isn't about technically whether there are situations where keeping certain information hidden makes sense but this whole internet-wide and 2p2-wide phenomenon of encouraging antisocial behavior, gamesmanship and a generally toxic mindset in situations where being straightforward and honest and doing your homework will get you at least 95%. Especially when advanced "gamesmanship" advice only really works if you're reasonably skilled. I guess this is probably worse for dating advice - I can't even imagine what's out there because even IRL dating advice tends to be far more cynical than necessary - but even when it works you lose because, again, life is not about winning a series of small battles against adversaries. Big wins in life, even in technology, come from strong relationships that transcend gamesmanship.

But kind of the point is you don't have a relationship with these recruiters. Most likely you never hear from them again. Internal or external. They do not work with you, and employing "gamesmanship" does not hurt you. But not making an extra $10k a year does.

jj and I were talking about hiring managers - I think pretty much everyone except you agreed that it's pointless to try to withhold #s from recruiters. It just makes your job search much less efficient. It's like going to a real estate broker to buy a house and not telling them anything about your finances or budget. How can they decide which houses to show? You're not going to make an extra 10K by withholding information from a recruiter - that's completely ludicrous. It's much more likely to cost you money because you will lose good leads by them deciding you're too difficult to work with and you will also waste time on poor leads because you didn't give the recruiter enough information to eliminate them from your search.

Good recruiters maintain relationships with candidates that they think have strong long-term potential but this kind of attitude would make it difficult to connect with them. Again, all of this seems incredibly self-defeating.

We'll have to agree to disagree because we obviously see things very differently. My career thus far has been served me and my family very well doing things my way while you have admitted to working for under market which would drive me crazy. Also fyi while I've only been in development for a few years I am in my late 30s so not some know it all college kid. Just a knowitall middle ager.

Small clarification - I would never give my salary to a recruiter cold calling me, although I certainly wouldn't bother trying to get a # from them.

But then again unless the recruiter is coming to me from a specific company that I know and have a non-zero desire to work for - I just ignore the recruiter. And otherwise I already generally know what salary range we're talking about for a position I would switch to.

This describes what happened at my previous job pretty well. I started there at 23 at basically an entry-level salary, immediately proved myself to be one of the more reliable members of my team (I didn't know that at the time, I think I've always been generally poor at measuring my own value), and four years later my salary had only gone up like...10-15%? in that timeframe, just small cost of living increases from year to year mostly. Usually "our parent company isn't doing so well, our hands are tied with what we can do this year", it never felt like a good time to ask for more. When I finally did learn how much I was getting underpaid I felt pretty betrayed, and I felt like I would rather work somewhere where my employers are treating me like they value me and want me to stay (as you seem to be) rather than just trying to get away with paying me as little as I would accept.

I joined my current job a year ago at a similar salary from my old job (where I finally got a big raise after demanding it). I'm doing very well so far here too - our software involves like 5 different platforms/languages and I'm one of just a few people that's written code on all of them, and talking to my manager about salary stuff (which he doesn't deal with directly, he's just a programmer too) he said he'd talk to his boss for me, and the raise I got came in at...8%. This was outside the yearly review process, which starts next month, so I think a big test will be whether they also are willing to bump me up through that, or else it appears I may be stuck working for cheapskates again. Or maybe I've hit the cap on my value, idk, but when you talk about 125k-175k as ranges for a programmer and I'm living in SF, I imagine I haven't. It's a startup so I have some stock options too, but we're getting large for a startup so the # of options I have is small enough that the odds of me ever retiring to the Mediterranean on them is a super longshot.

Mostly (as you suggested) I just don't want to deal with this **** and have to keep asking about money related things from people who don't seem to want to give them to me if I don't twist their arms, I just want to do my job.

Good for you!

Not only that, I'm probably underpaid right now! And I don't really have a big problem with it. In the end, the ability to create value matters far more than the ability to capture it because the latter is ephemeral while the former is much more tangible in the long run. I'm more than comfortable right now and an extra 10-20K is not going to change much. Generally speaking, you don't want to take jobs where you'd be grossly underpaid because it's also probably a bad career move, but unless you have 20+ years of experience and mostly trying to cash in, you do need to worry far more about building your career than immediate compensation.

You've mentioned your age before but it's not about that.

Right, not sharing your actual current compensation with a recruiter you don't trust early in the stage is normal - you just give them a range that they need to meet for something to be worth your while. But that has nothing to do with bargaining, but more about just being guarded with strangers who may want the information for unscrupulous reasons. Of course, almost everyone ignores most recruiter spam.

I would think it's more important to fight harder for compensation early in your career. The extra $10,000 a year you make when you're young will be worth a lot more in the future than the extra $20,000 you make late in your career (both from growing a flat $10k over the course of 20 years via investment, and then more from the effect it will have on future salaries).

Goofy, this is a site that's really useful (with various caveats) for figuring out how your salary compares: http://data.jobsintech.io/companies Particularly if you can find companies comparable to yours.

Options are a strange thing and I think most developers value them incorrectly. Ideally you should know roughly what investors have paid per share at the last funding round. The rough value of your options are the # of shares you have * the difference in your exercise price and the price the investors paid (discounted a bit because investors have preferred shares).

The nice thing about this approach is that it basically bakes in a reasonable risk/reward factor because that's what investors are doing when they're deciding if its worth investing or not.

So then its your option value / year + annual salary that roughly reflects your true compensation.

No idea how accurate it is, but there's also: https://hired.com/salary

Everything else equal, sure, but often everything else is not equal. First few years out of school, people won't care much about your previous salary except when they try to sell a mediocre salary as an amazing offer because it's 30% higher than your still out-of-school salary but they will care if you have valuable experience. For example, domain knowledge in a hot field can easily be worth more than an extra 20-30K a year.

Nice! Checks out for me.

I notice that they picked 50th, 70th, and 90th percentiles. People are so damn clever and subtle these days.

Anyone looking at Angular 2 now thats in beta yet? Thoughts vs React?

If it makes any difference, I've said a number to recruiters and they said "that's too low, I'll submit you for $Y."

Granted, I still see myself as foot-in-the-door and I also live in a new city, so I don't have a good pulse of the market yet, but I'm figuring it out pretty quickly. According to hired.com, I should be earning about $130k, but that seems a bit far-fetched to say the least.