Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer

Summary

When the story of how I landed a job at Airbnb went viral, I was surprised at how infatuated people were with my negotiations. Media stories portrayed me as some kind of master negotiator—a wily ex-poker-player who was able to con the tech giants into a lucrative job offer. This is silly. It’s silly for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones is that in reality, my negotiation skills are nothing special. There are lots of job candidates who are better negotiators than I, to speak nothing of recruiters and other professional negotiators. It just so happens that most people don’t negotiate at all, or if they do, they just negotiate just enough to satisfy themselves that they did. Worse yet, most of the advice out there on negotiation is borderline useless. Almost anything you read on the subject will be a vague and long-winded exhortation to “make sure you negotiate” and “never say the first number.” Beyond those two morsels of advice, you’re pretty much on your own. I thought to myself: why is there so little actionable advice out there about negotiation? I suspect it’s because deep down, many people believe that negotiation is inexplicable, that it’s something some people can do and others can’t, and that there’s no real way to break it down so anyone can learn it. I say that’s bullshit. Negotiation is a skill that can be learned just like any other, and I don’t believe it’s particularly elusive or hard to understand. So I’m going to try to explain how anyone can do it. Three caveats. First: I’m not an expert. There are people who really are experts at this, and when my advice contradicts theirs, you should assume I’m wrong. Second: negotiation is tricky to generalize about because it’s deeply intertwined with social dynamics and power. The appropriate advice for an Asian male in Silicon Valley may not be appropriate for a black woman in Birmingham, Alabama. Racial, sexual, and political dynamics accompany you to the negotiating table. At the same time, I want to...