After reading this piece about asking for raises in software engineering, I feel compelled to share something that I’ve learned about negotiation. I can’t claim to be great at it, personally. I know how it works but– I’ll be honest– negotiating can be really difficult for almost all of us, myself included. As humans, we find it hard to ask someone for a favor or consideration when the request might be received badly. We also have an aversion to direct challenge and explicit recognition of social status. It’s awkward as hell to ask, “So, what do you think of me?” Many negotiations, fundamentally, are conceived to be uncomfortably close to that question, and the social taboos and protocols around asking questions like that can make the process difficult for anyone to navigate. So I’m far from a tactical expert, and I’ll admit as much. There is one thing, however, that I’ve learned about successful workplace negotiators: they do it creatively, continuously, and persistently.
The comic-book depiction of salary negotiation is one in which the overpaid, under-appreciated employee (with arms full of folders and papers representing “work”) goes into her office and asks her pointy-haired boss for a raise: a measly 10 percent increase that she has, no doubt, earned. In a just world, she’d get it; but in the real world, she gets a line about there being “no money in the budget”. This depiction of salary negotiation gets it completely wrong. It sets it up as an episodic all-or-nothing affair in which the request must either be immediately granted (that’s rare) or the negotiator shall slink away, defeated.
Here’s why that scenario plays out so badly. Sure, she deserves a raise; but at that moment in time, the boss is presented with the unattractive proposition of paying more (or, worse yet, justifying higher payment to someone else) for the same work, rejects it, and the employee walks away feeling bitter. If this scenario plays out as described, it’s often a case where she failed to recognize the continually occurring opportunities for micro-negotiations, both before and at that point.
First of all, if someone asks for a raise in good faith and is declined, that’s an opportunity to ask for something else: a better title instead, improved project allocation, a conference budget, and possibly the capacity to delegate undesirable work. Even if “there’s no money in the budget” is a flat-out lie, there’s nowhere to proceed on the money front– you can’t call your boss a liar and say, “I think there is” or “Have you checked?”– so you look for something else that might be non-monetary, like a better working space. Titles are a good place to start. People tend to think that they “don’t matter”, but they actually matter a great deal, as public statements about how much trust the organization has placed in a person’s competence. They’re also given away liberally when managers aren’t able to give salary increases to people who “obviously deserve” them. Don’t get me wrong: I’d take a 75% pay raise over a fancy title; but if a raise isn’t in the question, then I’d prefer to ask for something else that I might actually get. When cash is tight, titles are cheap. As things improve, who gets first pick of the green-field, new projects that emerge? The people with the strongest reputations, of which titles are an important and formal component. When cash is abundant, it usually flows to the people on or near those high-profile projects.
Many things that we do, as humans, are negotiations, often subtle. Take a status meeting (as in project status, of course). Standup is like Scrabble. Bad players focus on the 100-point words. Good players try not to open up the board. Giving elaborate status updates is to focus on the 100-point words at the expense of strategic play. A terse, effective, update is a much better play. If you open yourself up to a follow-on question about project status (e.g. why something took a certain length of time, or needed to be done in a certain way) then you’ve done it wrong. You put something on the board that should have never gone there. The right status (here meaning social status) stance to take when giving (project) status is: “I will tell you what I am doing, but I decide how much visibility others get into my work, because there are people who are audited and people who are implicitly trusted and the decision has already been made that I’m in the second category… and I’m pretty sure we agree on this already but if you disagree, we’re gonna fucking dance.” When you give a complete but terse status update, you’re saying, “I’m willing to keep you appraised of what I’m up to, because I’m proud of my work, but I refuse to justify time because I work too hard and I’m simply too valuable to be treated as one who has to justify his own working time.”
Timeliness is another area of micronegotiation, and around meetings one sees a fair amount of status lateness (mixed with “good faith” random lateness that happens to everyone). The person who shows up late to a status meeting is saying, “I have the privilege of spending less time giving status (a subordinate activity) than the rest of you”. The boss who makes the uncomfortable joke-that-isn’t about that person being habitually late is saying, “you’re asking for too much; try being the 4th-latest a couple of times”. As it were, I think that status lateness is an extremely ineffective form of micronegotation– unless you can establish that the lateness is because you’re performing an important task. Some “power moves” enhance status capital by exploiting the human aversion to cognitive dissonance (he’s acting like an alpha, so he must be an alpha) but others spend it, and status lateness tends to be one that spends it, because lateness is just as often a sign of sloppiness as of high value. Any asshole can be late, and the signature behavior of a true high-status person is not habitual minor lateness. In fact, actual high-power people, in general, are punctual and loyal and willing to do the grungiest of the grunge work for an important project or mission, but they magically make themselves unavailable (without it being obvious that that’s what they’re doing) for the unimportant stuff. If you’re looking to ape the signature of a high-power person (and I wouldn’t recommend achieving it via status lateness, because there are better ways) you shouldn’t do it by being 10 minutes late for every standup. That just looks sloppy. You do it by being early or on time, most of the time, and missing a few such meetings completely for an important reason. (“Sorry that I missed the meeting. I was busy with <something that actually matters.>”) Of course, you have to do this in a way that doesn’t offend, humiliate, or annoy the rest of the team, and it’s so hard to pull that off with status lateness that I’d suspect that anyone with the social skills to do it does not need to take negotiation advice from the likes of me.
Most negotiation theory is focused on large, episodic negotiations as if those were the way that progress in business is made. To be sure, those episodic meetings matter quite a bit. There’s probably a good 10-40 percent of swing space (at upper levels, much more!) in terms of the salary available to a person at a specific career juncture. However, what matters just as much is the preparation through micronegotations. Someone with the track record of a 10-years-and-still-junior engineer isn’t isn’t in the running for $250,000/year jobs no matter how good he is at episodic salary negotiations. It’s hard to back up one’s demand for a raise if one is not perceived as a high performer, and that has as much to do with project allocation as with talent and raw exertion, and getting the best projects usually comes down to skilled micronegotiations (“hey, I’d like to help out”). In the workplace, when it comes to higher pay or status, the episodic negotations usually come far too late– after a series of missed micronegotiation opportunities. One shouldn’t wait until one is underpaid, underappreciated, under-challenged, or overwhelmed with uninteresting work, because “the breaking point” is too late. The micronegotiations have to occur over time, and they must happen so fluently that most people aren’t even aware that the micronegotiations exist.
One upside of micronegotiation over episodic negotiation is that it’s rarely zero-sum. When you ask for a $20,000 raise directly (instead of something that doesn’t cost anything, like an improved title or more autonomy or a special project) you are marking a spot on a zero-sum spectrum, and that’s not a good strategy because you want your negotiating partner to be, well, a partner rather than an adversary. Micronegotiations are usually not zero-sum, because they usually pertain to matters that have unequal value to the parties involved. Let’s say that you work in an open-plan office. For programmers, they’re suboptimal and it’s probably not wise to ask for a private office; but some seats are better than others. Noise can be tuned out; visibility from behind is humiliating, stress-inducing, and depicts a person as having low social status. If you say to your boss, “I think we agree that I have a lot of important stuff on my plate, and I want the next seat in row A that becomes available”, getting a wall at your back, you’re not marking a spot on a zero-sum spectrum, because the people who make the decision as to whether you get a Row-A seat are generally not competing with you for that spot. So it’s no big deal for them to grant it to you. Instead, you’re finding a mutually beneficial solution where everyone wins: you get a better working space, and you’re no longer seen from behind (bringing a subtle improvement to the perception of your status, character, and competency, because the wall at your back depicts you as one who doesn’t fully belong in an open-plan office, but is “taking one for the team” by working in the pit) while your boss gets more output and is being asked for a favor (cf. Ben Franklin) that will demand less from him than a pay raise under a budget freeze.
The problem with software engineers isn’t that they’re bad at episodic salary negotiations. No one is good at those. If you’ve let yourself become undervalued by such a substantial amount that it “comes to a head”, you’re in a position that takes a lot of social acumen to talk one’s way out of. It’s that they aren’t aware of the micronegotiations that are constantly happening around them. To be fair, many micronegotiations seem like the opposite: humility. When you hold the elevator for someone, you’re not self-effacingly representing your time as unimportant; instead, you’re showing that you understand the other person’s value and importance, which is a way of encouraging the other person to likewise value you. The best micronegotiators never seem to be out for themselves, but looking out for the group. It’s not “let’s get this shitty task off my plate and throw it into some dark corner of the company” but, “let’s get together and discuss how to remove some recurring commitments from the team”.
What does good negotiation look like? Well, I’m at 1,700 words, and it would take another 17,000 to scratch the surface of that topic, and I’m far from being an expert on it. What it isn’t, most of the time, is formal and episodic. It’s continuous, and long-term-oriented, and often positive-sum. When you ask for something, whether it’s a pay raise or a better seat in the office, it’s OK to walk away without it. What you can’t leave on the table is your own status; you can leave as one who didn’t get X, but you can’t leave as a person who didn’t deserve X. If your boss can’t raise your pay, get a title bump and better projects, and thank him in advance for keeping you in mind when the budget’s more open. If a wall at your back or a private office isn’t in the cards, then get a day per week of WFH and make damn sure that it’s your most productive day. This way, even if you’re not getting exactly the X that you asked for, you’re allowing a public statement to stand that, once an X becomes available, you deserve it.
Underappreciated workers don’t need to read more about episodic negotiations and BATNA and “tactics”. They need to learn how to play the long game. Long-game negotiation advice doesn’t sell as well because, well, it takes years before results are achieved; but, I would surmise, it’s a lot more effective.
