Salary Negotiation Resources
Apr 15, 22[WIP] As a software engineer, I always felt that negotiating your salary is not a fair situation. This feeling is even stronger when you’re joining a startup, and you’re probably going to negotiate with the company CEO. Think about it for a second - his/her full-time job is to negotiate, while yours is to make sure that your code has good quality, your team doesn’t have any blockers or that the onboarding process is inclusive and supportive.
With this scenario in mind, I learned the hard way that I must prepare myself before joining a negotiation. There are really great resources on the web, and I’ll list a few that were helpful to myself.
- Candor’s salary negotiation guide
- Lenny’s 10 commandments of salary negotiation
- Patrick’s negotiation guide
My personal share here would be to figure out a number - think of total compensation and not just salary, that could include base salary, stock, benefits, signing bonus - before you start the negotiation per se and practice ways to communicate it! I had a hard timing negotiating in the past because communicating what I wanted was a challenge for me. Another key learning for myself was to have clear how much value I was bringing to the team/company I was going to join and how my knowledge would help the company in a short term.
Angel’s list salary tool and triplebyte’s salary tool were super helpful to understand how much other engineers make and gave me a lot of confidence to ask for the numbers I wanted.