I would not tell recruiters my current salary, ($75K) but I did tell him my target salary, which was market rate for a mid-level Ruby dev in my city. ($115K) He wanted to go in at $110K.
I kept telling him how odd it was to be negotiating salary upfront, and he told me "that's just how recruiting works." I just shrugged and let him do his job. If I'd wanted to negotiate my salary myself, I wouldn't be using a recruiter. Truth be told, I'd take $95K.
I learned from the art world, a lot of times "market value" is a fiction created by people whose job it is to manage expectations on all sides. It's in everybody's best interest to simply accept the status quo. Sure, you can buck the system and gain an additional $10-20K, but that takes a lot of effort and I'd rather put that effort elsewhere.
People buy into the cult of individualism too much. There was an article a month or so back about the maple syrup cartel. People here were applauding the renegades bucking the cartel. Not me. I'd get on very good terms with my cartel rep, get him a very good gift basket for Christmas, jump through every hoop they want me to jump through. The cartel takes a nasty, volatile market and smooths it out and makes it into a nice, reliable engine. That's what I want to be a part of. Not a damn free-for-all.
Any other career field, it would be 10+ years before I can make $100K. Here I managed to do it in 3 years. Be a team player. Climb the ladder, pay your dues. It doesn't take as long as you think.
> Be a team player. Climb the ladder, pay your dues. It doesn't take as long as you think.
This attitude is why engineers get bullied and steamrolled into working for a small fraction of the value they create for their employers, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table over the course of their careers. Being a team player is for after you're on the team -- but before that happens it's not personal, it's business. Anyone who takes it personally and not as a purely business negotiation is not someone you should work for.
I'd argue that it's a lack of professionalism that's the real problem. It's easy to negotiate yourself out of a perfectly good job offer if you don't know what you're doing. And lets be honest, most devs haven't the slightest clue how to do salary negotiations. Someone posted Patrick's guide, and that's a good start, but you need to learn a whole bunch of little lessons about the corporate world before you can really start to apply them effectively.
Until then, why not just work for market rate or just slightly below? Don't stress yourself out, there's no reason to and it'll hurt your bargaining position. 90% of it is done before you even get to the table anyway.
By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.
Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
"If I'd wanted to negotiate my salary myself, I wouldn't be using a recruiter."
For me, recruiters are useful for two reasons: to find me interesting opportunities and to help me get an interview.
When they've served those two functions, I'd prefer them to just get out of my way. From that point on, I feel my own interests are best served by me representing myself.
The recruiter's real customer is not really any one particular candidate, who they might see just once in their whole career, but the employer, who will likely be a repeat customer if the recruiter satisfies their needs. Looked upon from that perspective, it's not always in the recruiter's interest to land the candidate the highest salary possible. That might get the recruiter a higher cut that one time, but their real customer might not be too pleased if the recruiter keeps sending them expensive candidates. They'd be far happier if the recruiter managed to get them a sweet deal on a good worker.
So I'll just keep doing my own negotiations, thank you very much.
> The recruiter's real customer is not really any one particular candidate, who they might see just once in their whole career, but the employer, who will likely be a repeat customer if the recruiter satisfies their needs.
And I'm cool with that. Recruiters do an important job for me at the point in my career that I'm at. Cut through the bullshit. I don't want to deal with a wishy-washy employer. I don't want it to be my whiny voice they hear asking them for more money.
I want a buffer. Because if there's one thing I know about corporations it's that there's a lot of stupid thinking going around when it comes to hiring. Employers think they want things when the things they want, once they had, they'll realize they didn't really want that, and you're the one that has to pay the price for that. Using a recruiter means you're serious about hiring.
I want to stay in my own little world and just code. Job hunting is stressful. I'm happy to let the recruiter do the stressful parts for me. Far as I'm concerned it's a fair trade.
A real estate agent is not likely to sell 15 or 20 houses to the same buyer. But a recruiter could well sell 15 or 20 candidates to the same employer. That gives the recruiter a far greater incentive to please the employer than a real estate agent has to please a buyer.
I kept telling him how odd it was to be negotiating salary upfront, and he told me "that's just how recruiting works." I just shrugged and let him do his job. If I'd wanted to negotiate my salary myself, I wouldn't be using a recruiter. Truth be told, I'd take $95K.
I learned from the art world, a lot of times "market value" is a fiction created by people whose job it is to manage expectations on all sides. It's in everybody's best interest to simply accept the status quo. Sure, you can buck the system and gain an additional $10-20K, but that takes a lot of effort and I'd rather put that effort elsewhere.
People buy into the cult of individualism too much. There was an article a month or so back about the maple syrup cartel. People here were applauding the renegades bucking the cartel. Not me. I'd get on very good terms with my cartel rep, get him a very good gift basket for Christmas, jump through every hoop they want me to jump through. The cartel takes a nasty, volatile market and smooths it out and makes it into a nice, reliable engine. That's what I want to be a part of. Not a damn free-for-all.
Any other career field, it would be 10+ years before I can make $100K. Here I managed to do it in 3 years. Be a team player. Climb the ladder, pay your dues. It doesn't take as long as you think.