| I did not use your service, and that might have made a difference. I don't blame you at all, I just wanted to share my experience. Here are some relevant details: During the interview process the company told me their budget for the position. The company has about 130 employees, about 40 engineers, so not super small but not large either. Upon receiving an offer, they offered me the max for their budget. It was an acceptable amount for my circumstances, but I also knew it was slightly below market rate. In an email, I wrote something along the lines of "I'm excited to join but I need to consider some other offers. I would sign today for a 10% base salary increase." They told me to take a hike. Unfortunately I was bluffing (no other offers) and I had recently been laid off and I needed a job, so I backtracked and was and to secure the position. I think I made some mistakes in this process, such as 1. Not being honest with myself about whether or not their max salary was acceptable 2. Not securing multiple offers at the same time as recommended by interviewing.io (though in my defense I still don't know how to do this, recruiter teams work at extremely different speeds and I tried hard to get multiple companies to align - perhaps this is where the service would shine) 3. Bluffing about other offers when I didn't have leverage I think reading all the articles and watching the videos on the site made me optimistic and feel like money is just waiting to rain on me if only I ask for it, so at the time I was disappointed that it didn't work as expected. It's been about a year and a half since that experience and at this point I'm at peace with it, but I think I'll behave slightly differently the next time I'm in a negotiation situation. My biggest takeaway is that if a company states a budget, it's valid to assume that its a hard upper limit. |
Do you have some time to talk? You don't have to, and it'd be a big favor to ask for your time, but I'd love the opportunity to dig in a bit more because this is really surprising to me. Even in the kind of crappy market we had a year and a half ago, for asking politely for a small raise to result in being told to take a hike doesn't compute. So either I need to update my priors (important because I don't want other people to run into this!) or there are some extenuating circumstances here.