Several years ago I wrote a blog post on salary negotiation for engineers. This probably created more value than anything else I’ve ever written — I have a folder in Gmail with thank-you messages from people, and my running total is something north of $2.3 million in added salary per year, mostly in $15k to $25k chunks.

A buddy of mine, Josh Doody, has decided to thoroughly own this area, and published a book (Amazon link) on the topic. I rather enjoyed the book, and thought I would have him on the podcast to talk about the topic in more detail.

[Patrick notes: As always, the below transcript occasionally has my thoughts inserted in this format.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• How to avoid the “What is your desired salary?” question
• How to trade off across multiple axes when doing a salary negotiation (salary, vacation days, equity, etc)
• How to get raises after being hired

A brief announcement: Keith Perhac and I have parted ways with regards to the podcast, amicably, largely due to scheduling issues. Both he and I have been quite busy with business and life, and we’ve moved to different countries, so we’ll be running our podcasts independently in the future. We’re still great friends and will probably appear on each others’ programs occasionally.

Salary Negotiation with Josh Doody

Patrick McKenzie: Hideho everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, but I’m known as Patio11 on the Internet. This is the 12th episode of the Kalzumeus Podcast.

Things are going to be changing a little bit. Keith Perhac and I have been co-hosting this podcast for the last couple of years, but we’ve moved in different directions in our personal and professional lives. Both of us have young daughters. We’re now living in different countries. It’s difficult for us to make the time to do this on a weekly basis as you might notice because we’ve only done 12 episodes in something like four years now.

We’re going to be podcasting independently. We’ll probably still be guests on each other’s programs in the future as is now, I guess, just the “me” podcast for the moment. I’ll have a variety of guests on.

Today, I’ve brought Josh Doody. John is a buddy of mine. We came up in the MicroConf community together. We play poker occasionally in Vegas. Josh is actually good at it. I’m not.

Josh has written a book called “Fearless Salary Negotiation” [Patrick notes: if you prefer Amazon it’s here] That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Salary negotiation pitfalls before getting hired and after getting hired, specific mostly to software people, because if you’re listening in this podcast, you’re probably a software person, but widely applicable to folks from all walks of life.

Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Josh Doody: Thanks for having me Patrick, it’s great to be...

For the full transcript see here.