I am back after an unplanned extended absence. After a multi-week trip to Europe, the first real vacation I have taken in a long time, I was blessed with having my oldest son home for a little extra time after his college year ended, and before his new residence was available. This meant that Dad’s home office was not available during my usual writing hours. I chose not to try to fit the square peg of “writing time” into the round hole of “the rest of the day”, and thus, you have all been starved of my brain leakings.
I have a row of Post-it notes on my monitor as prompts for my weekly writing. The last one I wrote was during the height of the House budget crisis. There was so much partisan spin on both sides of the aisle about what was happening that I was getting dizzy reading the news.
I am not going to issue any red-tinged or blue-tinged opinions on the outcome that was eventually reached. I am going to talk about the process to get there and the negotiating that barely happened.
I am fond of telling people that there is a very good book on negotiating out there called Getting to Yes. It was an excellent read to help you think about the different ways to negotiate, the way that you negotiate, and most importantly, the way that people negotiate against you. After telling people to read the book, I often tell them that learning the different negotiating styles taught me to essentially ignore the advice of the book and the notion of principled negotiation.
I remember having a contract negotiation with a friend of mine for some development work about a decade ago. We went front and back a few times before the contract was ready to be signed. When we reached an agreement, he noted “You must have had some really bad experiences with your contracts to require so much work in them”. On the contrary, making sure that everything was spelled out nicely in the contract helped to ensure they were all very seamless.
The only deal I really did not negotiate was the first one I ever signed, and that was mostly because the people who sent it to me, in all of its eighteen-page glory, said it was a mere formality and really did not mean much. I worked with this company for the better part of the next two years without thinking much about it.
Around that time, my first son was born and I became a parent. Setting aside all of the excitement and positive emotions of that experience, I experienced a step-function increase in my cost of living. I communicated this to the primary mobile game publisher I was working with as we were coming up on the end of a six-month contract.
The problem was, the more I mentioned that we needed to discuss the next steps in our relationship, they kept delaying a conversation on terms. Finally, in the second last week of our six-month contract, they sent over a contract for one year with a lower monthly amount than the current monthly amount which I had told them was not enough considering I now have extra costs.
We scheduled a phone call for later in that week where their VP of publishing tersely asked “Look, do you want to be in business with us or not?”
I sighed heavily and said “No”, and we ended the call.
I do not think they were ready to hear that, and they were pretty angry at me.
In the final month of not negotiating this agreement, I had a lengthy conversation with some people who worked at a competing publisher. They offered me a much more flexible contract for twice the monthly amount as the first publisher.
I did not know this at the time, but this is referred to as a BATNA (Better Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). I teach this word to lots of people I mentor because it is a very important thing to have, and it is a powerful concept.
Most developers are super shitty negotiators. I know that I was. I was accidentally a great negotiator a few times in my life leading up to this moment and now I understand why:
I was willing to walk away from the negotiation completely.
Whether you are negotiating a job, or negotiating contract work, most developers have some sort of really strong desire to sign the agreement. This is a really dangerous tendency because if you are negotiating against a hardball negotiator, this will be leveraged against you.
We saw this play out in the House budget conversations. For the longest time, there was a lot of “not-negotiating” going on, or as I like to call it: No-gotiating.
It is super important to know what you want out of an agreement when you enter negotiations and what you are willing to give up. I developed a reputation as a hardball negotiator for jobs because I am a family man with a very high cost structure due to having kids. I have had to patiently explain that to a lot of people who somehow think you can share a three-bedroom in the bay area with four kids, or wait until your end-of-year bonus in order to pay your rent. I am also super grateful for the companies that understood that and were willing to be flexible on terms in order for us to do great things together.
So where does that leave us?
It is really important to make sure you understand what you can and cannot negotiate. I have helped some people add both cash and other considerations to their various negotiations over the years. Many of them were shocked at what they received by stating their position and giving some room to adjust terms. In some cases, where there was very little flexibility in dollar amounts, a few people have gotten formal reviews scheduled into their job offers or contracts where they received bumps in pay at the six-month mark as the very last thing they could have added in order to have their consideration re-examined.
Recently I have talked with people after they accepted an offer that had a lot of room for improvement. They admitted that they figured if it was not enough, they could always ask for changes after the fact. That is hard to do once you have put your name on that agreement. Sometimes it is hard for a company to do that due to its size, sometimes it is hard to do that because you do not have any leverage to request those changes after it has been fully executed.
If anything, I hope that this encourages people to make sure they are getting what they want in an agreement before signing it. You might be wondering what are all of the moving parts that you can negotiate. Goodness me, look at the time. We will have to go into all of those things at a later date.
It is good to be back, I really missed writing for you all. Please feel free to Socials this. Retweet. Re-mastodon? Re-Thread? Whatever it is you do. Also, feedback is a gift and I love presents. Please comment on this post, email me a note, or fax me your impressions.
See you next week.
