About the Guest

Josh is a salary negotiation coach who helps experienced software developers negotiate their job offers and the author of Fearless Salary Negotiation: A step-by-step guide to getting paid what you're worth.

Links

• Twitter: @JoshDoody 
• Website: fearlesssalarynegotiation.com
• Read Josh’s book, Fearless Salary Negotiation
• Josh’s Salary Negotiation Coaching services
• A detailed article on how to answer the salary history and salary expectations questions: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/the-dreaded-salary-question/
• Salary negotiation email (how to write a counter offer email): https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/salary-negotiation-email-sample/
• Salary increase letter (how to write an email asking for a raise): https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/salary-increase-letter-sample/

Transcript

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Mike Julian: Hi, folks. I'm Mike Julian, your host for the Real World DevOps podcast. My guest this week is Josh Doody, a good friend of mine and who is also a salary negotiation coach for engineers and author of the book, the Fearless Salary Negotiation. His articles have appeared in glassdoor.com and any number of other locations and he's amusingly also been interviewed live on the BBC, which was kind of cool when I found out about that. Josh, I'm just imagining BBC calling you and you're like, "Oh, shit. I should probably put some pants on."

Josh Doody: I already had pants on. I was at Starbucks and I started tweeting back and forth with whoever the producer was, and then within 45 minutes I was live on the air on international TV on the BBC being interviewed from my office. So that was interesting.

Mike Julian: Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. I don't know too many people that say they've been interviewed by BBC live. So that's pretty awesome.

Josh Doody: That's a feather in my cap for sure.

Mike Julian: Absolutely.

Josh Doody: It was a pretty awesome, scary experience, and I'm really glad that it happened as quickly as it did because I think if I had time to think about the fact that that was going to happen I could've gotten nervous, but I didn't have time to get nervous. I literally was just scrambling to get some kind of lighting in my office and make sure my camera was working. So I spent 20 minutes on logistics and then I was on live international television being interviewed on BBC, and then it was over. Three minutes later it was done.

Mike Julian: That's a lot of work for such a short little time. So I want to talk to you today about salary negotiation, job negotiation, asking for raises, this whole gamut. But where I want to start is everyone's favorite topics. Everyone loves a good train wreck. So what's your favorite negotiation went totally sideways story?

Josh Doody: Well, I was thinking about this before we talked in case you asked about it, and I'm not sure I can tell you my favorite one because the only way I could tell it is if I censored so many pieces of it that it would be boring and meaningless to everyone. But the CliffsNotes for that one was it was a company that we have all heard of and use their services. They’re currently a private company. And just throughout the negotiation it was one red flag after another of my client trying to negotiate and then the company freaking out when he questions the value of their equity, which they're a private, so it's just monopoly money basically. And just one thing after another where the recruiter was just basically losing his mind, and eventually my client, even though this company had offered him more money, decided just to stay put. He was like, “You know what? I'm not going to go work there because if they're treating me like that right now I can't imagine what it's like to work there."

Josh Doody: But there's another one that can be a little bit less vague. It was a similar story, but this is a nice little way to kind of kill two birds with one stone because people like to ask, “Well, what happens if my job offer gets rescinded when I negotiate?” And my answer to that is I always tell my clients, I say ... They're like, "If we do what you're telling me to do are they going to rescind the offer? Are they're going to get mad at me?" I say, "Listen, I can't tell you that there's a 0% chance that will happen. It's greater than zero, but it's so small I can't even see it like on the graph." But it does happen occasionally. I think I've had I want to say two, maybe three clients in almost three and a half years that this has happened to.

Josh Doody: But I had a client who was going to work for an engineering firm. He was an experienced mechanical engineer. He got a pretty compelling offer from this company, but he knew that there was room to negotiate just based on market value research and some other kind of rudimentary stuff. And up to this point, there had been ...