Computer Programmers make me sad sometimes. We're so good at so many things, and so good at learning whatever we want, but there are certain things we simply refuse to get better at, despite them not being all that hard, to our own detriment.
Talking to girls and negotiating salary are two things that we're historically bad at. We're actually bad at lots of things, but these two are unique in that rather than finding ways to get better at them, we instead proclaim them to be Impossible Things For Computer Programmers To Learn and refuse even attempt to get a little bit better at them.
This is really strange.
If you were bad at writing Objective-C code, but it was 2008 and knowing Objective-C would let you answer "Yes" to any of those dozen emails a week you were getting offering $150/hr to write Objective-C, what would you do? Would you perhaps spend a few hours learning how to do it?
Now what if you were bad at negotiating?
"No way. Negotiating is evil. They should just pay everybody the same. That'd be fair."
Or dating?
"No way. Talking to girls seems hard and scary. And I'd actually have to walk over there and talk to one of them."
But here's the thing. It's only hard because you've never done it. Go do some of it and you'll find it's really not that bad.
Developers have a reason for all this, of course. They like things to be "fair". They like meritocracies. The idea that somebody off the street could just talk his way in to making more money than somebody with more skill just comes off as wrong. An affront to the way the world should work. Immoral.
Salary Transparency is all the rage these days because it presses those fairness buttons in Engineers. Negotiation is unfair, and I'm no good at it anyway. But no need to bother with all that. Salaries are set. Everything is "Fair". Sign me up!
Transparency also sounds good from the employer perspective. You get to control the negotiation procedure (by completely eliminating it) and set salaries how you like. Take it or leave it.
Unions also resonate nicely with Software guys. Again, negotiation goes away and everybody is paid "fairly" according to some scale. Everybody wins.
But not everybody wins. In fact, both these ideas fall down because roughly 50% of the developer population loses in any arrangement where you set all salaries to the same level. That's how distributions work.
Imagine you are an engineer who's genuinely good at what he does and knows how to negotiate a rate that reflects that. Why would you leave, say, 100k on the table to go work for a place like Buffer, where even the CEO is only making $150k/year? Why would you join a Union where your bill rate was set based on the average joe with the same number of years experience? In either case, you're worth a lot more on the open market, so you'd opt out.
That also means that shops with Transparent Salaries may have a hard time attracting the best talent (since only a guy who knew he was in the bottom 50th percentile would seek them out), but that's their problem not ours, and a bit off topic for today.
We're talking about fairness, and how negotiating is amoral because it places negotiating skill ahead of technical skill in determining how much you get paid, and how companies are ripping developers off by paying them less than they deserve just because they're bad at negotiation.
But I disagree.
- I don't agree that negotiating is "amoral", nor that rewarding people for being good at negotiation is "unfair", nor that you can get "ripped off" by receiving a salary that you agreed to.
- I think it's fine that people can negotiate with one another, and that being good at negotiating has advantages.
- I think the most productive thing to do in a world where people negotiate is to learn some basic negotiation skills so as to live in that world.
- I think the least productive thing you can do in that world is to try to make everybody stop negotiating for things. Doing so can only make things worse for you, since everybody else will continue negotiating after you stop.
Ah, but you counter:
Negotiation is stressful, a waste of time and not interesting at all for many software developers. It would just be better for the public good for no salary negotiations to take place, because people would worry less about being underpaid. Less stress is almost always good for work productivity. And there will be more justice.
Setting aside the disputable bit where the author refers to a process that can add millions of dollars to one's total career earnings as a "waste of time", have a quick re-read of that comment and notice how he uses terms like "public good" and "justice." We're back to capturing the in-built developer-brain need for things to be fair.
As developers, we tend to look for technical solutions to things, so when we see a situation like the one above, we come up with ideas to "fix" it and make everything fair. Transparent Salaries, no-negotiation workplaces, a precise formula translating skill to compensation. Keep building technical solutions until we've coded the problem out of existence. That's how things are done in our world.
But a more productive approach when confronted with the fact that "negotiation skill seems to have more bearing on how much I can make than technical skill" might be to just take advantage of that fact. If tech folk are as generally bad at negotiating as everybody seems to agree, the best course would seem to be to simply get better at negotiating.
That's actually quite easy to do. And if you do so, you'll make a lot more money.
That's a good thing.
by
Jason Kester
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