Job Offer Negotiation Was A Success

It’s official: I took the new job!

I’m glad to finally have this out of the way so my brain space can be consumed less by anticipating work and instead truly embrace this brief period of funemployment.

Before I accepted my job offer I, of course, negotiated. It helps that I have a lot of very aggressive friends and mentors that have taught me to be relentlessly entitled. You won’t get what you don’t ask for and all that jazz.

In my negotiations, I asked for an extra $20k in salary and an extra week of vacation my first year of employment. In return, my future employer gave me a $10k bump in salary, title promotion, and a promise of flexibility when it came to the vacation, though one they wanted to handle off the books (i.e. we’ll see if they live up to those promises). My new salary is still a pay cut relative to what I’d been making before but is in line with industry standards for the size of the company. The vacation policy is pretty iffy, but I’ll live.

While I’m a little disheartened that I didn’t get quite the salary bump or vacation commitments I wanted, the title promotion by itself is a big plus in my book. One of the things I have been worried about as part of this career change has been moving far back in terms of seniority. My thought is, even if this job doesn’t work out for the long haul, having that “Senior” by my job title will help add legitimacy to my experience and make it easier for me to apply for bigger roles or justify to big companies to bring me on board down the line.

In negotiating my job offer, I did three things:

One, I established a high anchor for compensation early. A lot of folks new to fields try to be wishy washy and force the other party to name a number first. But then, if an employer low balls, you have a much harder time edging them up drastically. With enough data– I use Glassdoor and Paysa for tech roles– you can generally figure out the range which a company is likely to offer and pick a number above it as an anchor point. For me, my anchor point was my previous pay since I was coming from a more highly compensated role and other job offers I had received for that sort of work.

Two, I dug into and negotiated multiple areas of my offer. While compensation was most important to me, through the negotiation process the company was able to “clarify” (i.e. I think they figured this out for the first time) their quite generous maternity leave policy. I also think being flexible on compensation got me a little flexibility in terms of vacation time on their end, which they had started pretty hard-nosed about (for reasons I don’t entirely understand).

Three, and most importantly, I remained consistently open and respectful, even when there was tension between me and the company and when I did not receive exactly what I wanted. In game theory, one’s optimal strategy will differ if they are engaged in a single or repeated game. Salary negotiation is a repeated game. Establishing early that I am willing to assert my worth but also do it in a respectful way will pay dividends down the line, I think, when pushing for raises, promotions, and for being seen as someone who is willing to be “tough” and represent the company as aggressively as I do my own interests. This negotiation may have ended, but the next one is always waiting around the corner.

Have you ever negotiated a job offer? Do you do so by default? What strategies do you use to determine your market value and negotiate?

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Will Changing Careers Destroy My Dreams of FIRE?

My interview last week went really well. There’s a very good chance I’ll be getting an offer from the company, I think, based on the conversations I had with the hiring manager. This role is a good opportunity to get my foot in the door in an industry I’ve been wanting to transition to for a while. And the company itself, while it’s early days yet and I’m sure in time I’ll find it doesn’t hit all my criteria, seems to be a pretty good one with low turnover and good growth. At the very least my commute would be significantly easier, and for that alone the transition might be worth it.

The biggest hesitation I’ve had making this leap has been, obviously about the money. As part of this career change, I’ll be taking a big pay cut. Probably 20% of my pay if I’m lucky. Also, as a smaller company, they are missing a lot of benefits I’ve gotten very accustomed to in the corporate world like retirement plans with matching and maternity leave, etc.

Using rough estimates of what the company will offer based on my discussions with the hiring manager, the average pay for this role in the market, and the maximum I’m willing to take in terms of a pay cut, I expect our household savings rate will drop significantly from 64% to 55%. If I manage to negotiate up the cash compensation to just a “mere” 20% pay cut, our savings rate will only drop to 60%.

Luckily fiancé recently started working again after a six month period of unemployment, so in a sense it won’t feel like our financial progress will be changing that much at all since I never really got “used to” a 64% savings rate. However, the new set up requires that both of us be working in order to maintain a >50% savings rate. Once we have kids, for instance, if we do day care or if fiancé becomes a stay at home father, we’ll be hovering 30-40% savings rate territory. Not terrible by any means, but a huge difference if our goal is FIRE. Like, a ten year difference.

So long and short of it: Am I giving up FIRE to pursue this career change? Yes and no. For just a little while, I want to prioritize the now-me versus the future-me. If I angle this thing right, I should be back on a good career and income trajectory in 1-2 years. Sure, I may not hit all the dates on my FIRE plan. But really this stuff is all about flexibility and optimizing happiness along the way. Hopefully, I’ll be doing just that.

Is it worth it to take a pay cut in order to change careers? Any tips on how to negotiate maximum possible pay while still resigning to a pay cut in this sort of scenario?