“I don’t want to come off as greedy.” A dozen different engineers have told me this, always right after taking the first number a recruiter read off a screen, and none of them were wrong to worry about how asking would sound. They were solving for the wrong risk.
The risk isn’t sounding greedy. It’s leaving five or six figures on the table because nobody told you the number had slack built into it on purpose.
Sometimes it doesn’t. A startup handing you a Series A term sheet on a fixed band might genuinely be quoting you close to the ceiling, and no script turns a real ceiling into a higher number. That happens less often than people assume. It still happens, and it’s worth saying up front rather than pretending every offer has a hidden ten percent waiting for the right question.
The company already expects a counter
Patrick McKenzie has probably gotten more engineers comfortable asking for more money than anyone else who’s written about it, and the reason his essay on the subject keeps getting passed around a decade later is that it names the actual problem in one line.
We overwhelmingly suck at it. We have turned sucking at it into a perverse badge of virtue.
His math on why it matters: the value of five thousand extra dollars a year, compounded over the next decade through raises and a higher baseline for your next job, is close to a hundred thousand gross. Fifteen thousand extra a year clears a hundred thousand net of taxes. And the company can absorb it — McKenzie puts the fully loaded cost of a market-rate engineer in California or New York at close to twenty thousand dollars a month, which makes the gap between two candidates’ counters look like rounding error from where the offer letter gets signed.
A hiring manager who has done this dozens of times expects a counter. Silence is what actually surprises them.
Never name your number first
This is the single rule every negotiation writer converges on, and it’s the one engineers break first, usually on a screening call, usually because “what are your salary expectations?” gets asked early and answering feels like basic cooperation.
Haseeb Qureshi, haseebq.comTen Rules for Negotiating a Job OfferRule three is “information is power,” and it’s doing most of the work in this section — read it for the auction framing.Haseeb Qureshi’s framing of why is the clearest one I’ve read: a company wants to be like a bidder in a secret auction. But unlike the other bidders, it wants to know exactly how high all of the other bids are. Every number you give away early is information you can’t take back, and it becomes the ceiling of every offer that follows.
Answer the salary question with a question. “I’d rather understand the full role and the range for it first — what’s budgeted for this position?” Most recruiters have a number ready and will give it, because most of them ask that question forty times a week and know exactly how it usually goes.
If they push, a range works better than silence. A flat refusal reads as difficult. “I’m looking in a range and want to make sure the role’s a fit before we get into specifics” closes the conversation without opening your hand.
Don’t decide on the call
Whatever number comes back, the worst move is answering it in the same conversation where you heard it. The number probably doesn’t need more thought. You do — you’re about to decide under social pressure from someone whose job is to close you, and that’s a bad room to think clearly in.
Qureshi’s second rule is to keep the door open at every decision point instead of committing early, and McKenzie’s version of the same move is more specific: cite someone else. You don’t need their permission to take two more days. You need the sentence. “Let me talk it over with my partner and get back to you Thursday” costs nothing socially and buys real time.
Nobody has ever rescinded an offer over that sentence.
Salary isn’t the only lever
Base salary is the number everyone fixates on because it’s the one printed largest on the offer letter, but it’s rarely the only thing that can move, and treating it as the only lever means walking away from the ones that will.
Levels.fyiLevels.fyiCompany- and level-specific comp, crowdsourced and cross-checked — the fastest way to find out whether a number is actually competitive before you counter it.Sign-on bonus. Equity refresh timing. A later start date, if you’d rather not burn your remaining vacation before you leave your current job. Title, sometimes, if the number itself really is fixed and only the level underneath it has room. McKenzie calls this trading across dimensions instead of pushing on one, and it works because different things cost the company different amounts of political capital to grant — a hiring manager who can’t move base by a dollar can often move a start date by three weeks without asking anyone’s permission.
Ask what’s flexible before you ask for more of any one thing. The answer tells you where the actual room is.
More than one offer is the only leverage that reliably works
Everything above helps at the margins. This is the one that actually moves a number by a meaningful amount, and it’s also the hardest to engineer on purpose: get a second company far enough along that you can tell the first one it exists.
Qureshi’s rule here is blunt — tell the other companies you’ve received an offer, once you have one, because it’s the single fastest way to compress everyone’s timeline toward the same week. A company sitting on your application for three weeks will often produce a decision in three days once a competing deadline is real.
The one time I tried to run two processes in parallel on purpose, I undersold the deadline to the slower company — I said “sometime soon” instead of the actual date on the other offer — and it cost me most of a week of leverage before I fixed it. Say the date. Not the vague version of the date.
If you’re juggling this across three companies on three different clocks, the negotiating itself turns out to be the easy part. Remembering which recruiter needs an answer by Friday and which one you told “early next week” is where it actually falls apart, and it’s exactly the kind of mess Vigil exists to keep straight.
Negotiating won’t fix a bad offer
McKenzie’s line is that negotiating never makes a worthwhile offer worse — the worst outcome of asking in good faith is landing back at the number they already gave you. That’s true, and it’s also not the same claim as “negotiating turns a bad offer into a good one,” which it doesn’t, and no essay about tactics should let you walk away believing it does.
Some offers are underleveled from the start, and no amount of skillful asking fixes a title problem — you’re negotiating within a band that was wrong before the call started. Some very large companies run genuinely fixed bands for early-career roles with zero individual flex, where the recruiter isn’t bluffing when they say there’s no room; the lever there is the level, not the number, and that’s a different, longer conversation. I’ve noticed the fixed-band recruiters are often more upfront about it than anyone else in this process — they’ll just tell you the number is the number, instead of running the “let me check with the team” routine a smaller company sometimes performs when the real answer is also no. Whether that’s a point in favor of big companies or just a smaller stage to perform on, I haven’t decided. Neither situation is a reason not to ask. They’re just reasons to know, going in, what a good outcome actually looks like for the specific offer in front of you.
The worst that happens when you ask is that they say no and you’re exactly where you already were. Ask anyway.