I haven\u2019t negotiated anything in my (admittedly short) employment history. My only experiences so far have been internships, and I haven\u2019t heard very much about people negotiation the terms of their internship. I had a pretty laissez-faire attitude about the terms, though \u2013 I didn\u2019t consider negotiation and decide against; I honestly paid little attention to the terms before accepting.<\/p>\n
I think that\u2019s pretty typical, though. As I apply and interview for full-time positions, I definitely think I should negotiate my contract to some extent. Knowing myself, I probably won\u2019t be \u201cplaying hardball\u201d by any means, and very well could end up doing a token negotiation before accepting.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one of the reasons I\u2019m very glad to have done these readings \u2013 a lot of it makes sense, and it\u2019s clear that you can get considerable benefit by negotiating before accepting a job. I knew this beforehand, but I didn\u2019t really think about how to go through the process and didn\u2019t have any specific knowledge of things to look for or strategies to use. I\u2019ll definitely refer back to these resources when I\u2019m negotiating an offer (hopefully relatively soon!).<\/p>\n
I mentioned earlier that I might end up doing a \u201ctoken negotiation\u201d before accepting. By this, I mean that I wouldn\u2019t consider myself very assertive in unfamiliar or stressful situations, and so I don\u2019t think I would be very comfortable negotiating terms of my employment. If I make some sort of counter-offer that gets accepted, even if it\u2019s small, I would likely pat myself on the back for negotiating at all and consider it done, even if I was leaving a lot more on the table.<\/p>\n
For this reason, I\u2019d say that I could have a lower starting salary (or other benefits) than a hypothetical student with similar experience or abilities, but a personality more suited to negotiation. It makes sense, and I\u2019d say this likely happens across the tech industry \u2013 people in a similar role or station might have different salaries due simply to how much they negotiated right at the beginning.<\/p>\n
This obviously isn\u2019t ideal \u2013 people should be paid according to the value of the work they should do, or the value of their skills. I think in a perfect world it would be a meritocracy, where salaries would be independent of negotiation, but that\u2019s not realistic. This negotiation climate is the natural conclusion of the situation. Each party wants to maximize their resources, and so they are incentivized to be less up-front about the situation.<\/p>\n
This would be much more acceptable if the two parties were in a position of equal power. They are not \u2013 the employer has much more than the prospective employee \u2013 and there are additional factors that could disincentivize an employee from negotiation. They\u2019re in a strange situation, being in an adversarial relationship with their soon-to-be employer.<\/p>\n
I would say it\u2019s not ideal, but I wouldn\u2019t go so far as to say it\u2019s unethical. It\u2019s just another example of a time when the rewards aren\u2019t tied to merit quite as directly as they perhaps should be, and there are much large issues that should be addressed first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading02: Negotiation, Huh? I haven\u2019t negotiated anything in my (admittedly short) employment history. My only experiences so far have been internships, and I haven\u2019t heard very much about people negotiation the terms of their internship. I had a pretty laissez-faire attitude about the terms, though \u2013 I didn\u2019t consider negotiation and decide against; I honestly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3177,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3177"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/19"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jacob-beiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}