The Insider's Guide To Negotiating Your Tech Salary And Compensation
Your ability to negotiate is undeniably one of the highest-leverage skills you can learn. But tech workers are lousy at negotiation!
This course is designed for tech employees who are actively or passively in the job market. Candidates who proactively think about negotiation during their job search can increase their compensation by 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars with a few extra hours of work (I'm proof of this!).
Negotiation is not that complicated. It's not even that difficult.
If you have (1) a desire to get paid more and (2) the ability to tolerate some uncertainty, you have everything you need to manufacture leverage and negotiate a higher compensation. This course teaches you how to do exactly that.
We'll demystify how successful negotiations work so you feel confident in discussions with recruiters and hiring managers.
Here's what you'll gain by the end of the course:
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✊🏽 Understand if and when to negotiate
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🔮 Create leverage for negotiations
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💰 Deconstruct the best ways to improve your TC
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📝 Share concrete tactics and phrases to employ
This course is broken down into 3 major parts:
- Principles - How does negotiation work and why is it worthwhile?
- Planning - What should you do (and not do) before and after you receive an offer?
- Tactics - What is the best course of action for various scenarios?
We'll also cover tips for common situations such as:
- Negotiating your current compensation at your job
- Negotiating when you have a single offer
- Dealing with exploding offers
Finally, we'll also share specific phrases that have been used successfully by dozens of engineers, for you to adapt/copy/steal into your own negotiation playbook.
This course is the distillation of 100s of hours of experience and feedback from negotiation: 100s of conversations with other tech employees, dozens of conversations with recruiters, and the author's own journey with negotiation across 10+ companies.
One of the best things you can do for negotiations is to land several offers. If you need help with that, take this course first: [Course] Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer
This is a course about the "insider's guide to negotiation", so it had better be taught by an insider! Rahul is a Stanford CS grad and Silicon Valley tech veteran who has seen the profound impact of negotiation throughout his 15 years in the industry.
Rahul's compensation went from $110K at the beginning of his career to $830K in his peak earning year, 2021, as a Tech Lead and Manager at Meta (Facebook). That's more than 7x! A lot of his Total Compensation (TC) growth can be attributed to his ability to negotiate. The 2 primary segments of negotiation in Rahul's career:
- 2013: 5 offers at Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and Square
- 2017: 6 offers at Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Stripe, Uber, and Airbnb
Some examples of the shocking increases that Rahul saw with the leverage he had:
- The Snapchat salary went from $160K --> $180K, the stock grant went from $600K --> $1.0MM, and the signing bonus went from $10K --> $100K 💸
- The Facebook stock grant went from $325K --> $600K and the signing bonus went from $30K --> $45K 💰
The numbers here are due primarily to having control over timing, information, and options. This is something you can learn and replicate, and the results can be life-changing.
(No, you don't need to get 5 offers, get a Stanford degree, or live in the Bay Area. Many others have replicated or exceeded Rahul's success in their own careers.)
Condensing Years Of Learning
Rahul is now the cofounder of Taro, a platform designed to accelerate career growth for engineers. In this capacity, he has directly coached dozens of engineers through negotiations and has also seen the outcome of 100s of other negotiations across companies, geographies, and timelines.
This course condenses the collective wisdom from these tech workers into a high-density reference guide for you.
Connect with Rahul:
This is awesome video. I actually watched this video after making a couple of mistakes and was able to rectify it, After a gap of 6 months I was able to get pretty good offers with $10K increase. But in India, you cannot hide your existing salary and you have to reveal your expectation range, without it they will not even call for interview, hence that one point didn't apply to India. Rest all tactics like not telling HRs your other companies, Not telling them how you desperate for a job is really game changer!
The advice is so on point and valuable!
I was lucky enough to hop on a call with you during my negotiation phase and use your advice in real time, resulting in a significant improvement in my Meta offer. Thank you so much for that Rahul!
My base salary increased $24.5K and I received 30% more stock options in my equity package!
I chatted extensively with the VP of Engineering at the startup I ended up joining after Snapchat. The startup directly asked me if I prefer more salary or equity, which is extensively covered in this course.
Thanks so much Rahul!!!
I'm a junior dev, and have made almost all of these mistakes during negotiation. Phenomenal advice. Thanks, Rahul!
I used the course to help with negotiation and got an increase. Thank you, Rahul and Alex, for the informative content and support!
I followed the advice in this course around negotiating with Instacart and received a $30K increase. The tactics here really work!
I applied the ideas from the course to improve the offer I received at a smaller public company when I left Amazon.
I moved out of Seattle for the new job, and I realized from this course that I could negotiate on things like relocation and signing bonus. The tactics in this course were instrumental for getting a meaningful bump without much extra effort.
I am very very grateful for all your tactics guiding me through the negotiation process. I was able to apply them directly and they worked extremely well as I joined an early-stage AI startup.
As someone going through a bunch of interviews, this course was exactly what I needed. It changed the structure and timing of my interviews to gain more leverage, in addition to giving me definite boost in confidence when engaging in compensation conversations with recruiters.
