Can I negotiate a cut of cloud savings into my yearly salary?
Hi Tarodactyls! It's been a while since I posted here. Last time I posted, I just started a contract job months after being laid off, and was looking for advice. Last week, my manager and I had a talk where he said everyone is impressed with what I can do, and wants to hire me full time. Nothing's set in stone yet, so I have to keep the pedal to the metal. In the meantime, I have a question for when negotiating comes around...
An engineer friend and I were talking about how we’d like to get a 2% cut of all the money we save for a company using AWS. I thought that’d be a really good deal. I think I found AWS service that can save the company a bunch of both time and money. And since the company is growing and will be making more money, there’ll be a lot of ways for me to grow in AWS and help them save more money. Imagine getting a small cut of six figures of what they save from what you implemented once a year, just because you implemented it? Maybe I was just thinking very excitedly, but have you ever heard of something like this being offered in a negotiation? If so, how would I best be able to negotiate something like that into a deal?
Since it's almost time for me to get a full time job, I'm gonna have to peep that negotiation course from Taro. I have a feeling someone will link it in the comments. Thanks, everybody!
Discussion
(1 comment)- 0
10 hours agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI like the idea, but situations like these are incredibly rare. It's simply too complicated:
- You need to keep track of the value added percentage dynamically as that's certainly going to change month-to-month, year-to-year
- If you want to be exposed to upside, it's only fair to be exposed to downside as well. Let's say you cause a bug that loses the company $100k or even $1M (I saw this happen all the time at Meta). Would you be okay having your salary drop by 2% of that?
- It's unfair to have these deals as many employees work on something that is more than 1-step away from direct revenue (e.g. infra, internal tools, process/culture improvements)
#3 is a big one as that's how every company eventually functions where you have a core group that is directly connected to $$$ and a bunch of groups that support that group. At Instagram for example, I worked on ads. I shipped multiple products that made $10M+ per year, but I didn't get a $100k+ raise every time. That's because those ads wouldn't be able to make money without all the people working on the organic app, build infra, ad testing tools, UI framework, etc.
Anyways, good luck getting a great full-time offer! The negotiation course is here for easy access 😉: The Insider's Guide To Negotiating Your Tech Salary And Compensation
