Negotiating Your Salary Is About More Than Money

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Scroll through LinkedIn right now and you may find the same advice repeated by well-meaning people: “In a market this rough, just be grateful anyone will hire you. Take the offer.” I could not disagree more. Negotiating your offer is not ungrateful, and it isn’t greedy. Done well, it’s good for you and good for the company hiring you. I misunderstood this early in my career, and it cost me. I didn’t know it was an option When I got my first job in tech, I didn’t know negotiation was even on the table. The recruiter asked what salary I wanted, and I gave a number below the bottom of their range. They came back with the lowest number in their band—still more than I had asked for—and I was thrilled. I had no idea I’d left money on a table I couldn’t see. Then I started teaching at a Bay Area coding bootcamp in the evenings. A coworker mentioned what he made and it was nearly double my salary for roughly the same work. My jaw dropped. During that time, I began interviewing and got an offer. I handed in my resignation and my manager countered with an offer for nearly 30K more. That money had been there the whole time. At that moment, I realized my salary was a business decision, not a measure of my worth. What it looks like from the other side Years later, I became an engineering manager and saw the salary discussion from a different angle: A position would open. Many interviews later, we’d find someone we wanted, and HR would hand me a salary range to make an offer. I was encouraged to make an initial offer near the bottom to leave room for, you guessed it, negotiations. Most applicants didn’t negotiate. The first offer is rarely the ceiling. It’s usually the floor. Companies extend a reasonable number and quietly hope you say yes. It’s not all about the money Negotiating isn’t only about a bigger paycheck. (But who doesn’t want that?) Let’s say you’re on the job market, maybe recently laid off, and a low offer comes in. You take it out of relief. Then you start, you like the team, and you quietly resent the number. Now you’re stuck with it, and you’ll probably leave that role inside a year or whenever the market improves. Nobody wins there. You’re back on the market starting over, and the company loses someone good and pays more to replace you, when a fair number up front would have cost far less. Paying you fairly is cheaper than starting over. How to actually do it People overcomplicate this. Once I have an offer, I say some version of this: “Thank you so much for the offer, and I’m genuinely excited to join the team. I’m hoping we can come in around [10 to 20 percent higher than the original number]. Is there any wiggle room here?” Then I stop talking and let them respond. Why 10 to 20 percent and not double? The number you ask for is itself a signal. Ask for something wildly out of range and you’ve told them you never learned what the role pays, or that your expectations are miles from reality. That’s what makes a company walk away. A calibrated request reads as someone who knows their worth and did their homework. You’ve probably heard a horror story about someone who asked for more and had the offer yanked. Any company that would pull an offer over a reasonable question about pay is telling you exactly how they’ll treat you once you’re inside. If the salary can’t move, it isn’t the only lever. I’ve negotiated more remote days, a later start to drop my kids off, and a sign-on bonus when the base was locked. Most people negotiate none of these perks. You have more leverage than you think Negotiating can feel like something you can only do from a position of power. But if you’re in the final stages of an offer, you already have it. They want to hire you. They’ve spent weeks finding you. Now they’re hoping you say yes. That’s true even if you were recently laid off. Even if it’s your first job. Even if the number already looks higher than you expected. The game is being played whether or not you join in. Sit it out, and you’re not just leaving money on the table. You may be quietly shortening your own stay at a job you could have been happy in. So ask. —Brian The AI Arms Race in Technical Interviews Is Escalating If you’ve been on the job market for a software engineering role recently, you’ve probably encountered—or used—AI tools in the hiring process. From application filters to live interview assistants, both applicants and employers are trying to use generative AI to their advantage. Can real, human skills still shine through in this new reality? Read more here. This Graduate Student Equips NASA With Assembly Skills Sarah Downs, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University, has long been interested in robotics and dreamed of working with NASA. This year, she achieved that dream, collaborating with NASA and the U.S. Air Force on an algorithm that enables satellites to insert an antenna into the correct spot. Read more here. IEEE Program Helps Girls in India See a Future in Stem Women make up only about 28 percent of the global STEM workforce, in part because of limited access to educational resources for preuniversity students—especially in areas like rural India. An IEEE initiative, the Women in Science, Engineering (WiSE) project launched to help expand opportunities and hands-on learning for young women. Read more here.