Salary Negotiation

Kilivek said:

I don"t know law whatsoever, but I don"t see how that"s the case too. If you get into some hotshot law firm in NYC or DC, compared to Smith, Smith, and Smith attorneys at law in Bumfuck, Nowhere, does that not speak volumes in terms of the very same metrics as I alluded to in tech?

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I"m not a lawyer. I work in consulting.

And are you talking about agility now? What the heck are you talking about? Are you asking whether a big law firm looks better on a resume than a no where firm?

If its the last question I"ll tell you what matters is the results you delivered. If you delivered kick ass results and were a differentiator at the big firm and not a straphanger, like I said above, then yes its a bonus. But if you were at a no where firm and were a differentiator versus a straphanger at a big firm then someone is going to want to hire you for your record so you can win for them.

If its the first question you"ll have to define more what you"re talking about.

I thought you were in law, no worries.

I"m in consulting as well. Using a technology at the organization that created said technology looks infinitely better than using the technology at a smaller firm.

If by agility you mean, outside of bs business buzzspeak, the ability to leverage new technologies and methodologies quickly, then yeah, learning it from the horse"s mouth so to speak, looks much better.

ToeMissile said:

Most of what you"re saying are things that should be assumed in this discussion, well I"m assuming they"re assumed

I can"t imagine anyone here is saying that your past performance/achievement is more important than previous who your previous employers are. But I can"t imagine that in the majority of cases having those big names on your resume don"t lend, at a bare minimum, an initial level of expectation about a person who has been at said employer/school.

Do you have to be able to back up your claims? Of course. Like in one of the previous posts someone mentioned the "manager/whatever on x" that the individual didn"t know shit about, that person obviously has no business making such claims, regardless of whether or not they were technically part of said operation/project. It"s pretty stupid to try and pull that shit imo, and if I was looking for potential employees and came across someone like that, they would out of the running immediately.

TLDR - "big names" matter if you can back it up, and aren"t the "end all, be all"

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Thing is about common sense...unfortunately not so common

Kilivek said:

I thought you were in law, no worries.

I"m in consulting as well. Using a technology at the organization that created said technology looks infinitely better than using the technology at a smaller firm.

If by agility you mean, outside of bs business buzzspeak, the ability to leverage new technologies and methodologies quickly, then yeah, learning it from the horse"s mouth so to speak, looks much better.

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No I"m talking from the meta perspective.

I"m talking about the ability of a business to shift and adapt, as a whole, to a change in circumstances/change in a requirement - not the ability to deploy a new technology. Getting 100k people to shift on a dime is harder than getting 100 people to shift on a dime. It"s just sheer inertia working against you in a big company.

That being said I don"t believe my husband (who"s in the tech side) agrees with you as a general rule but is much more of the "it depends on the company" mentality regardless of the size of the company.

I"m just hearing business buzzspeak though. I don"t know what type of requirement would necessitate an IBM or Oracle to shift or adapt as a whole organization. Anything that would make them do this, for example a Java, they always embrace or adapt very quickly. If they don"t, they get weakened (actually hardly ever die).

And any of these possible "requirements" we"re talking about are almost always created by the big 3 anyway.. IBM, MS, Oracle. Any "requirement" almost always comes out of them. I can"t name a recent game changer (there"s my buzzword for the day!) from a smaller firm that"s changed the game at that level of enterprise that weakened these three so much as to force change. So that"s why you want to work for them. You get fed the waterhose from the fireman directly.

So when you do decide to move to a different company.. If you worked as a consultant at any of these three firms, it looks great. If you did .NET coding at MS, Java or Fusion with Oracle, or Websphere work at IBM, that"s instantly a huge boost to your resume compared to doing the same work elsewhere. Someone said it best above.. if you get into these firms and survived, that sets a level of expectation for you that your interviewer can take to the bank.

And your husband is nuts. =P

ToeMissile said:

But I can"t imagine that in the majority of cases having those big names on your resume don"t lend, at a bare minimum, an initial level of expectation about a person who has been at said employer/school.

TLDR - "big names" matter if you can back it up, and aren"t the "end all, be all"

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I actually do hiring now, and I can tell you that when I review resumes it is not the name that gives me expectations of an individual"s skill level. I"ve seen too many twats who think putting Booze, Allen, Hamilton or something on a resume makes up for lackluster experience or a shitty attitude. The job descriptions are where I build conversations from. I don"t care if you worked for Microsoft, I want to know what you did for Microsoft. While I would be surprised if a person came to me with Microsoft on their resume and knew shit about Microsoft products, that goes for any company, regardless of size.

Your TLDR is correct though, with a caveat. Yeah, if someone can back up their shit then of course looking at the size of their previous responsibilities will weigh on your considerations. Responsibilities though, not company. Taking out the trash at Boeing doesn"t mean shit to me. I"d rather have someone who was working for a local subcontractor on a project but was doing real work and had actual responsibilities.

I basically agree with you, I just think the attitude of taking a big name company simply because it is a big name company, thinking that will shine on a resume, is a sign of immaturity and lack of experience in the workforce. Some of the smartest, most hot shit IT guys I have ever met worked for companies you have never heard of.

Does having these mega corps recruiting me change things? I"m in final rounds of onsite interviews, one I"ve already finished. I didn"t apply at these places.

Ok, maybe pose the question differently.

Assuming there are two candidates with roughly equal skillsets and communication competence, but one has 3-5 yrs exp doing .NET implementations at Microsoft consulting. The other has 3-5 yrs doing the same thing at a much smaller consulting firm. Assume that you, the hiring manager, have never heard of this company. All other things being roughly equal (as I said; skillsets, communication competence, educational background, et al).

According to some of my friends in HR, this happens quite often. When it gets narrowed down to this level, many of the candidates have similar experience and resumes.

Now, if you"re a smart HR manager, you"ll know that "results" as they appear on a resume aren"t that important. Why? Because if you"re in consulting and on some type of project, whether a tech, functional, or management role, you know anyone can fit the words to say almost whatever they want as long as the project itself wasn"t a complete disaster. That is to say more specifically and to the point: from the text on a resume, you can"t tell who was a real contributor and who sat reading FOH all day.

Now, given this fact, you have to set some level of expectation based on their background experience, not exactly what they wrote about that experience. I have no clue who the company Billy Bob Consulting is... Of course what the candidate says he did sounds fantastic, but I"ve never heard of them; my colleagues have never heard of them either.

The other guy did a variety of implementations at Microsoft. Because I know who MS is, I can set some level of expectation for this person. He might turn out to be a retard, but the chances are the other person is the dud, not this one... because having the MS name on his resume sets that level of expecatation for me. I"ll know he got exposed to the stuff I want him to do directly from the source, whether he absorbed it or not I cannot tell yet until he"s put to work, but among the two, he"s by far the safest bet.

That"s the difference the insigia ring gives you.

Lyrical said:

A lawyer calling anyone else a douche is like a $2 prostitute calling the Virgin Mary a whore. Your whole profession exists on the fecal matter of people who actually produce something in this country.

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QFmothafuckinT!!!

I feel like god just came into this thread and said, LET THERE BE LIGHT!

Lord Commander Chaos said:

I actually do hiring now, and I can tell you that when I review resumes it is not the name that gives me expectations of an individual"s skill level. I"ve seen too many twats who think putting Booze, Allen, Hamilton or something on a resume makes up for lackluster experience or a shitty attitude. The job descriptions are where I build conversations from. I don"t care if you worked for Microsoft, I want to know what you did for Microsoft. While I would be surprised if a person came to me with Microsoft on their resume and knew shit about Microsoft products, that goes for any company, regardless of size.

Your TLDR is correct though, with a caveat. Yeah, if someone can back up their shit then of course looking at the size of their previous responsibilities will weigh on your considerations. Responsibilities though, not company. Taking out the trash at Boeing doesn"t mean shit to me. I"d rather have someone who was working for a local subcontractor on a project but was doing real work and had actual responsibilities.

I basically agree with you, I just think the attitude of taking a big name company simply because it is a big name company, thinking that will shine on a resume, is a sign of immaturity and lack of experience in the workforce. Some of the smartest, most hot shit IT guys I have ever met worked for companies you have never heard of.

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This.

This is what I"m getting at. Like you could have been my split personality typing this post.

Zeste said:

Does having these mega corps recruiting me change things? I"m in final rounds of onsite interviews, one I"ve already finished. I didn"t apply at these places.

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Was it someone in HR or a recruiter that contacted you?

Etoille said:

Was it someone in HR or a recruiter that contacted you?

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Internal recruiters. They took my info and gave it to the actual department people who I would work with who then did the phone screening and interviews.

The recruiter might have passed my info to HR, who passed it to the department heads. They didn"t say, and I didn"t ask. I moved from recruiter to department head so fast, they did the phone interview that pertained to the actual work, and they made the decision to schedule the on-sites.

Kilivek said:

OK, maybe pose the question differently.

Assuming there are two candidates with roughly equal skillsets and communication competence, but one has 3-5 yrs exp doing .NET implementations at Microsoft consulting. The other has 3-5 yrs doing the same thing at a much smaller consulting firm. Assume that you, the hiring manager, have never heard of this company. All other things being roughly equal (as I said; skillsets, communication competence, educational background, et al).

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I know folks who"ve worked for Microsoft, and it is a very high stress job in a company with very low tolerance for bullshit and slackers. My current job is approximately zero stress, so someone from a pressure cooker like that would go cuckoo. Ah shit. Scratch that. PM me their resume if they"re in or near Denver.

At my job, we"re trying to replace a .NET developer on a small project. We"re getting people with wonderful looking resumes, but when they come in for an interview, it becomes real clear that the resume is not the person, just like the map is not the territory. Out of 10 people we"ve brought in for an interview (we"re looking for a senior dev/architect for a winforms app), only 2 were bozos, the rest were real nice, smart people - just not what we"re looking for.

Part of the problem is that the recruiting-interview cycle is real slow, so about half the folks get hired somewhere else between the technical phone screen and the face-to-face interview.

Another big part of the problem is the money. Best they can do is $50/hr (until they got it bumped up to 60 this week). The best candidate we"ve seen is a good friend of mine who I worked with for 5 years. Sadly, he turned them down for another job making $65/hr as a contractor.

Zeste said:

Internal recruiters. They took my info and gave it to the actual department people who I would work with who then did the phone screening and interviews.

The recruiter might have passed my info to HR, who passed it to the department heads. They didn"t say, and I didn"t ask. I moved from recruiter to department head so fast, they did the phone interview that pertained to the actual work, and they made the decision to schedule the on-sites.

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Right. When I said recruiter I meant internal; not an agency.

To answer your question, no, it doesn"t change a damn thing about what I"m getting at.

It would have if you were being recruited by program side folks, not company people paid to troll LinkedIn.

You"re describing the normal cattle call process.

I didn"t even bother responding to google last month when I was contacted same method. If someone from the department side had contacted me I probably would have taken the call even if it was just to hear something interesting with the intent of shooting them down - if you"re from HR/recruiting I have zero interest in talking you if you"re my first contact with a company.

*shrug*

Only time I want to hear from HR is when the package the department/exec side pushed through is going to arrive at my door.

God damn you"re cool.

Was she too busy to talk to Google because she was looking for an expensive gift for her assistant? Or helping people on the internet shop for engagement rings?

If your in a world where you can get bigass signing bonuses, you shouldnt be here.

You should be out and about in your R8 with some sluts, not us faggots...

On a better tone if your an economist, you might not make the bonus up front, but the top up pay for Principals can pay out like 4 to 8 times that a year just for staying if the majors think your gonna jump ship..