Name: Negotiation Course: Prefer Async Communication
Uploaded: 2024-05-06T21:41:46+00:00
Duration: 5 min 6 s
Description: Recruiters have much more information and practice with negotiation relative to job candidates

Negotiation Course: Prefer Async Communication

Recruiters have much more information and practice with negotiation relative to job candidates. The pressure of a phone call and our desire to please others means that phone calls become dangerous places where engineers shoot themselves in the foot. Too many tech employees keep speaking on the phone call and end up revealing too much.

- Recruiters have orders of magnitude more knowledge about the job, the range of possible offers from the company, and even the range of possible offers are peer companies. 
- On the other hand, most job candidates have a handful of data points around their compensation could be, based on their past jobs and what their friends have told them.

This information asymmetry clearly favors the recruiter, who can read your emotions and take advantage of the knowledge gap to lowball you.

For that reason, you should prefer to eliminate phone calls or keep them short, and then be deliberate about your emails where you can craft the exact message you want to send. Async communication is also better for clarity and you can research on your own.

Recruiters have much more information and practice with negotiation relative to job candidates

"Should I negotiate?" Answer: “Is water wet?” It's not often just sending a few emails can literally make you thousands of dollars. It’s worth a shot.

At the end of the day, working in tech, or anywhere really, is all about working with other human beings. Communication is the core skill necessary to make this collaboration effective.

Interpersonal communication is an important skill to have as a software engineer. As a software engineer, you work with a team of other software engineers to build a product or scale a system. In order to work effectively with the other members of your team, you need to be able to communicate with them so you are all aligned on the same end result.

Learn how to improve your interpersonal communication skills to design better software with your team

Master your interpersonal communication skills to build empathy and long lasting relationships with your teammates that extend beyond your current role. When you prioritize interpersonal communication, you can ensure that your projects are successfully completed on time.