Salary negotiation

[MasterOfKtulu109]

I am graduating in May and have done a few interviews for my first job. When the salary part comes up, I wanna know the best strategy. I've already read all the online info (start high and slowly find some middle ground without going too high and scaring the company away), but I want a little info that is more concrete than that. I'm graduating with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. No full-time experience obviously, but internship experience.

I've already looked at salary.com under 'mechanical engineer I' which applies to me since I have 0-3 years of experience. The salary structures are broken down into 25th - 75th percentiles.

Let's say for a job in a particular city, the salary site gives:

25th percentile: $50,000
75th percentile: $60,000

Assuming the company starts low (why wouldn't they?), what would be the best figure to come back with? Go a little above the 50th percentile, shoot high and hope not to scare the company, etc?

Any advice from those in the engineering field or what I should expect as a recent grad would be helpful. Since the salary site includes those with 0 to 3 years of experience in one category, it's a little hard to use the percentiles since a person with no experience can't expect as much as someone with 3 years.

 

[Cal166]

Friend started at 55k right out of college with a ME degree but he had a bit of experience with an internship during college. So you'll be lucky to hit 50k with no experience right out of college.

 

[oznerol]

~$50,000 is what you could/should be expecting.

Edit: Also, though I'm sure ATOT will disagree with me since they're all studs with years of experience - I don't think a fresh-out engineer is in any position to negotiate a salary, unless you have multiple offers or have interned there before.

Plus, most bigger companies have a set amount they give to entry-level employees anyway.

 

[Indolent]

Originally posted by: ducci
~$50,000 is what you could/should be expecting.

Edit: Also, though I'm sure ATOT will disagree with me since they're all studs with years of experience - I don't think a fresh-out engineer is in any position to negotiate a salary, unless you have multiple offers or have interned there before.

Plus, most bigger companies have a set amount they give to entry-level employees anyway.

I'd tend to agree with this. Unless you're a top student at a really good school or something, I don't think there's much room for negotiation, especially at the bigger companies. Smaller companies might have some room for negotiation, but in my experience, they don't pay as well in the first place.

 

[Pantoot]

Originally posted by: ducci
~$50,000 is what you could/should be expecting.

Plus, most bigger companies have a set amount they give to entry-level employees anyway.

We do, and ~50 is correct.

[Edit: to clarify the ~50 is really ~55k. And don't worry, you aren't going to scare anyone away saying you want 60k, they will just tell you that "for this grade we pay 55,250.]

 

[thepd7]

Originally posted by: ducci
~$50,000 is what you could/should be expecting.

Edit: Also, though I'm sure ATOT will disagree with me since they're all studs with years of experience - I don't think a fresh-out engineer is in any position to negotiate a salary, unless you have multiple offers or have interned there before.

Plus, most bigger companies have a set amount they give to entry-level employees anyway.

wrong.

1. No way a mechE with an internship and a gpa over 3.5 (not sure about your's OP) should accept less than $55. An EE with the same qualifications makes around $60k starting.

2. You ARE in a position to negotiate your salary since they decided to make you an offer. They might not NEED your services, but obviously they prefer them to whoever else applied for the job.

3. If you accept a lowball, you set yourself up for a career of getting screwed. If you are paid like an average or sub-par employee that's how you will be treated too.


I am not sure what experience you have with this but I am an EE new grad and many of my friends just graduated as ME. My buddy got an offer from Exxon-Mobil for $74k. He is exceptional but that just goes to show you $50k is low, not normal.

If someone offers you less than $50k I honestly wouldn't even bother countering. They obviously don't think highly of you.

OP whatever you get offered you can counter at $60k, if they go up great. If not then you have a decision to make. But $60k is not outrageous to shoot for, if a company thinks you asking $60k is too much then they are a cheap company. That's not saying for sure they will pay that but if they can't come anywhere close you don't want to be working there.

And OP, Best of luck!

 

[Reckoner]

You're on ATOT, you should be making at least 750k per year, with an additional signing bonus of course.

 

[Elbryn]

best scenario is where you have two offers to play on. that way you dont run into the worst scenario.. playing the i'm going to walk card and getting called on it.
buddy of mine from college had ME degree with top notch gpa, greater than 3.75
i think he went to work for GM starting at 55 in detroit.
course this was also more than 5 years ago.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: Elbryn
best scenario is where you have two offers to play on. that way you dont run into the worst scenario.. playing the i'm going to walk card and getting called on it.
buddy of mine from college had ME degree with top notch gpa, greater than 3.75
i think he went to work for GM starting at 55 in detroit.
course this was also more than 5 years ago.

I'd say the best scenario is when you go from one company to a competing company. The competing company will always offer you more than your current position. If you're coming straight from school, you're lucky if you get a permanent position from the start.

 

[thepd7]

Originally posted by: Regs

Originally posted by: Elbryn
best scenario is where you have two offers to play on. that way you dont run into the worst scenario.. playing the i'm going to walk card and getting called on it.
buddy of mine from college had ME degree with top notch gpa, greater than 3.75
i think he went to work for GM starting at 55 in detroit.
course this was also more than 5 years ago.

I'd say the best scenario is when you go from one company to a competing company. The competing company will always offer you more than your current position. If you're coming straight from school, you're lucky if you get a permanent position from the start.

Where the heck do all of you negative nancy's live and work? If you aren't a recent grad of Engineering, know of someone's specific offer in the part year who is a recent grad, or a hiring manager/HR person for engineering, stop spouting bs.

I haven't known ANYONE that was "lucky" to get a permanent spot that majored in engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical, computer, etc).

That being said, everyone I know has a 3.0+ and is not an idiot, maybe yall people just know too many idiots.

 

[LS20]

dont trust salary.com

compare it with what other students are getting...because it is relevant for this day and age, job climate, school (same pool of recruit), etc... at the very least, use BLS instead of salary.com

2ndly, you dont have much room for negociation.. take it or jump to the next offer

 

[Casawi]

I used the stats when negotiating my salary, it didn't help. They usually already know what they're going to pay you. I had my supervisor ask me how much I want to make and ... yeah it didn't matter what I said ...lol
He said that I have no experience, but if I do well there is a performance recognition pay raise and/or bonus. He wasn't lying, I got a 25% pay increase 5 months in.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: thepd7

Originally posted by: Regs

Originally posted by: Elbryn
best scenario is where you have two offers to play on. that way you dont run into the worst scenario.. playing the i'm going to walk card and getting called on it.
buddy of mine from college had ME degree with top notch gpa, greater than 3.75
i think he went to work for GM starting at 55 in detroit.
course this was also more than 5 years ago.

I'd say the best scenario is when you go from one company to a competing company. The competing company will always offer you more than your current position. If you're coming straight from school, you're lucky if you get a permanent position from the start.

Where the heck do all of you negative nancy's live and work? If you aren't a recent grad of Engineering, know of someone's specific offer in the part year who is a recent grad, or a hiring manager/HR person for engineering, stop spouting bs.

I haven't known ANYONE that was "lucky" to get a permanent spot that majored in engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical, computer, etc).

That being said, everyone I know has a 3.0+ and is not an idiot, maybe yall people just know too many idiots.

ok.

 

[FreshPrince]

take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

Your starting salary sets the bar of the rest of your career. If you take the lowball, you're screwing yourself for a VERY long time. If you are a quality candidate, demand a quality price.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

Your starting salary sets the bar of the rest of your career. If you take the lowball, you're screwing yourself for a VERY long time. If you are a quality candidate, demand a quality price.

I started off around 45k. Though after the first year they gave me a 15% raise. Every year after that is 5-8% raise. So I guess it depends. We also get a 5% bonus.

You don't have to anchor yourself in one company either. Many use my company as a "launch pad".

I would also consider how stable the company is. If it lays off 2-5 thousand employees a year, but pays 60k, it won't mean much when you're unemployeed after 6 months.

 

[thepd7]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

Your starting salary sets the bar of the rest of your career. If you take the lowball, you're screwing yourself for a VERY long time. If you are a quality candidate, demand a quality price.

Exactly what I took about 2 paragraphs to say. Props for your mad writing skillz.

 

[FreshPrince]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

Your starting salary sets the bar of the rest of your career. If you take the lowball, you're screwing yourself for a VERY long time. If you are a quality candidate, demand a quality price.

I disagree. Your work ethic sets the bar for the rest of your career. If I see a hard working young kid bust his hump for me, I usually try to take care of him and help accelerate his career. I've also seen older, more expensive employees that take absolutely no initiative and think they're worth their weight in gold when in fact they're dead weight. So it all depends on how you work, not how much you start with.

there are some people in the world that 100% of their world is all about "who you know," but we're talking about 1% here, the rest has to work hard to earn big.

larger public companies will actually pay less for entry positions than smaller/private ones. however, larger companies can offset this by providing much better benefits. I'm all about getting paid what you're worth but for entry position? no, I say prove yourself.

 

[ed21x]

Originally posted by: thepd7

Originally posted by: Regs

Originally posted by: Elbryn
best scenario is where you have two offers to play on. that way you dont run into the worst scenario.. playing the i'm going to walk card and getting called on it.
buddy of mine from college had ME degree with top notch gpa, greater than 3.75
i think he went to work for GM starting at 55 in detroit.
course this was also more than 5 years ago.

I'd say the best scenario is when you go from one company to a competing company. The competing company will always offer you more than your current position. If you're coming straight from school, you're lucky if you get a permanent position from the start.

Where the heck do all of you negative nancy's live and work? If you aren't a recent grad of Engineering, know of someone's specific offer in the part year who is a recent grad, or a hiring manager/HR person for engineering, stop spouting bs.

I haven't known ANYONE that was "lucky" to get a permanent spot that majored in engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical, computer, etc).

That being said, everyone I know has a 3.0+ and is not an idiot, maybe yall people just know too many idiots.

ok, I am an engineer, graduated from Berkeley with a decent GPA. starting salary should be around 50k, and at least 60k if you have work experience and aren't going for entry-level. Starting positions usually pay you less because the company is trying to weed out the crap, and then give significant offers/raises to people they like starting the 2nd year. This is how many companies do it... thus entry-level positions are rarely permanent.

 

[oznerol]

I'm going to stick with the ~$50K figure and no negotiations.

Your starting salary does not determine the salary for the rest of your career.

For engineering, full-time positions are more prevalent than contract work - especially for entry level.

It never hurts to ask for more, however, just don't be caught off guard when they tell you they're firm in their offer.

If you're getting an offer from a place you interned at, and have experience with - typically they treat intern work as industry experience and will pay you a salary on par with someone with ~1 year of experience.

If you have multiple offers, it is possible to use one to leverage the other.

That's about it. Take what you will, as I am a negative Nancy spouting BS.
:beer:

 

[rgwalt]

As you can probably tell, there are as many opinions as there are replies. I can give you some information from the petrochemical industry (chemical engineers). In chemical engineering, the availablity of jobs and what the jobs pay is dependent on the area of the country you want to live in and what kind of work you want to do. If you are a chemical engineer (or better yet a petroleum engineer), don't mind living on the Gulf Coast and don't mind traveling, then you can make serious money with a BS because there is seriously high demand. However, if you want to stay in a particular area of the country, then you'll have to sacrifice cash because the demand isn't as high.

All this being said, at least in the chemicals industry your true value after you start working for a company isn't based on the salary you get paid so much as other "value" factors. These include the company's investment in time and money training you to be competent in the industry, training you to do your job, preparing you to do other jobs for the company, and indoctrinating you on how the company does business. I am sure this is true for most "big" companies in other industries. So, if a big company's investment in you goes far beyond your salary, they are not going to low-ball you just to save some money. The reason is that in a competive environment they know that you will be likely to leave and go to work somewhere else.

For example, take ExxonMobil. Exxon does extensive market research on all of the positions they offer to see what their competitors are paying for similar positions. The company has an "equation" that they plug your information into. This information includes the position you will fill, how much education you have had (years in school), what degree you have, what area of the country the job is in, and may include a whole host of other information that I was never told about. On top of it all, typically their equation puts their offers for a given position higher than most of their competitors in a given market. As a result, they rarely negociate offers because they know where they stand relative to the competition.

Other "big" companies perform similar reviews. At the site I work at now (not Exxon), many of the starting engineers all got mid-year "compression" raises to keep their salaries competitive with the market. The company did not have to give them a raise, but did so to stay competitive.

The point I am making is that many companies already know how much they are going to pay you when they ask what your salary aspirations are. Typically the amount they are going to pay is going to be competitive (within a standard deviation) of other companies in the field for the same type of job. When you start receiving multiple offers you may have a chance to negociate. However, the best thing you can do for yourself when deciding between multiple offers is to decide what job you want to do. You need to weigh your interest in the actual job against the region of the country and the salary they offer. Maybe the job you want to do doesn't pay the best of all of the offers, or the place you want/need to live doesn't have positions with the best salaries. In these cases you can try to negociate, but you probably will not get a company to budge more than 5 to 10 percent.

Good luck!

R

 

[MasterOfKtulu109]

Thanks for all the advice. I figured right out of college, my only possibility for leverage is if I have two offers. I'm not going towards the big corporations (Exxon, Lockheed, etc); I worked for a big defense company this summer and hated it. I don't care if the benefits and pay are slightly higher at those places. I didn't feel like I would ever make a significant contribution; things move so slowly, and if something needs to be changed, it takes weeks. Not to mention, you could be fired and replaced and no one, outside of your supervisor, would even notice.

 

[bonkers325]

Originally posted by: MasterOfKtulu109
Thanks for all the advice. I figured right out of college, my only possibility for leverage is if I have two offers. I'm not going towards the big corporations (Exxon, Lockheed, etc); I worked for a big defense company this summer and hated it. I don't care if the benefits and pay are slightly higher at those places. I didn't feel like I would ever make a significant contribution; things move so slowly, and if something needs to be changed, it takes weeks. Not to mention, you could be fired and replaced and no one, outside of your supervisor, would even notice.

mid-size or small companies are where its at for entry-level engineers. you learn the important stuff at break-neck pace.

if you work for a big company, you will get put on big projects but for the wrong reasons. basically they will charge your hours to the client, but will pay you a small percentage of the $/hr charged. you may or may not learn, depending on who the engineers assigned to the project are. more likely than not, if its a big company, u will be working with an engineer who can eyeball most of the engineer-related work. meaning u wont have much of a chance to learn

 

[thepd7]

Originally posted by: FreshPrince

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

Your starting salary sets the bar of the rest of your career. If you take the lowball, you're screwing yourself for a VERY long time. If you are a quality candidate, demand a quality price.

I disagree. Your work ethic sets the bar for the rest of your career. If I see a hard working young kid bust his hump for me, I usually try to take care of him and help accelerate his career. I've also seen older, more expensive employees that take absolutely no initiative and think they're worth their weight in gold when in fact they're dead weight. So it all depends on how you work, not how much you start with.

there are some people in the world that 100% of their world is all about "who you know," but we're talking about 1% here, the rest has to work hard to earn big.

larger public companies will actually pay less for entry positions than smaller/private ones. however, larger companies can offset this by providing much better benefits. I'm all about getting paid what you're worth but for entry position? no, I say prove yourself.

That's not the way it works in big companies, maybe in a smaller company.

From the people I talked to in EE in the larger companies it isn't likely you will get more than a 6-10% raise, 3-5% is normal.

So it's not like if you start at 50 but should have started at 60 you will be at 60 in 6 months when you show how hard you work. It's more likely that you will be punished for at least 5-10 years (until you switch jobs or move up) by making less and less on raises than counterparts at other companies or even those within the company that negotiated.

Bottom line, if you don't at least try to negotiate you are silly. Unless you ask for a ridiculous amount more the worst they can do is say no.

 

[rgwalt]

Originally posted by: thepd7

Originally posted by: FreshPrince

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: FreshPrince
take that 45K offer and be thankful that someone offered you a job

or you could negotiate and go in with a sour taste in their mouth.

Your starting salary sets the bar of the rest of your career. If you take the lowball, you're screwing yourself for a VERY long time. If you are a quality candidate, demand a quality price.

I disagree. Your work ethic sets the bar for the rest of your career. If I see a hard working young kid bust his hump for me, I usually try to take care of him and help accelerate his career. I've also seen older, more expensive employees that take absolutely no initiative and think they're worth their weight in gold when in fact they're dead weight. So it all depends on how you work, not how much you start with.

there are some people in the world that 100% of their world is all about "who you know," but we're talking about 1% here, the rest has to work hard to earn big.

larger public companies will actually pay less for entry positions than smaller/private ones. however, larger companies can offset this by providing much better benefits. I'm all about getting paid what you're worth but for entry position? no, I say prove yourself.

That's not the way it works in big companies, maybe in a smaller company.

From the people I talked to in EE in the larger companies it isn't likely you will get more than a 6-10% raise, 3-5% is normal.

So it's not like if you start at 50 but should have started at 60 you will be at 60 in 6 months when you show how hard you work. It's more likely that you will be punished for at least 5-10 years (until you switch jobs or move up) by making less and less on raises than counterparts at other companies or even those within the company that negotiated.

Bottom line, if you don't at least try to negotiate you are silly. Unless you ask for a ridiculous amount more the worst they can do is say no.

Plan on making your first move to another company after 3 to 5 years. If you stay with a company much longer than 15 years, plan on being a lifer.

R