“Your salary shouldn’t be dictated by how good a negotiator you are.” (Ep. 432)
The home team discusses pay equity at New Relic, Okta’s security SNAFU, and the AI creating “wildly good” generative art.
Episode notes:
Read about how New Relic achieved pay equity—and what, exactly, that means.
Last month, hacker group Lapsus$ released screenshots showing it had successfully breached Okta’s internal systems using compromised credentials. What does it all mean? Read about it here and here.
Matt recounts a harrowing example of a man-in-the-middle attack that nearly emptied a friend’s bank account
Today’s recommendations: Cassidy recs Midjourney, an AI art-making tool currently in beta. (Learn more about Midjourney here.) Matt recommends Elden Ring to folks who want a more “adult” version of the Ceora-approved Breath of the Wild.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Subhajit for their answer to Send HTML in email via PHP.
Tags: pay equity, security, the stack overflow podcast
8 Comments
From the podcast transcription (somewhat after 16 minute) “There’s a really good article, I’m not saying this had cult status, but it went viral. It was somebody who was negotiating with Airbnb, Google, Facebook, and a few others. I can’t remember the name, but I will drop the link in the show notes.”
Could you share a link to that essay?
It’s split into two parts, here’s the first!
https://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-i/
It’s an incredibly good read and teaches some valuable lessons on negotiation and the grueling process of interviewing for software developer interviews.
I came here just to try to find the article’s link too 🙂
“Life shouldn’t be the way it is.”
This is not an injustice to overcome, it’s just life. How is this any different than “women should want to date me no matter how repulsive or infantile I am”?
Negotiation is just a part of life. You wouldn’t say someone isn’t allowed to negotiate to get the best possible price for their secondhand car, would you?
If you say people should be paid exactly $X for skill set Y, you’re asking every company to conform to a standard price list. Who polices that?
Negotiation isn’t fun but it’s a feature of any free market and getting the best deal for yourself (both the company and the individual). Some people are more talented at it than others, and why shouldn’t that work in their favor?
I think having skills in both software and in communication and negotiation just means you are a more well-rounded person and probably deserve the bump in pay you are able to get. In my experience, the people who champion only needing the technical skills for the job are often the ones acting as gatekeepers and toxic teammates.
I have very good negotiation skills as I started my career as a contractor. After 15 years, I also see a lot of people don’t have hard skills and they are in high positions. These higher roles are not due to the fact that they have good soft skills. It’s mainly because they are local, know the local language, or are from the nearby country. Here my negotiation skill plays a big role in my job satisfaction. it can be a role or salary negotiation. Sometimes both.
Negotiation yes . . . but some people are WILLING to work for $27 per hour, while others might not be willing to do the same job for less than $35 per hour. The personal compensation level of the interviewee is critical in this situation.