Negotiate for job in Engineering, tips to get a great job offer

[Music] all right this is the third video in a series on how to get a job working with FPGAs the first video was how to write a great resume to get you in the door the second video was once you're in the door how to interview well he gave you some example questions things to practice with and now how to negotiate for a great salary in a job digital design job working with FPGA is VHDL and Verilog so I would assume the first two steps went really well for you and you have a job offer congratulations you should be excited you have a job offer that's great or if you're in the negotiation phase this is also something you should check out so I'll give you some tips things that I've learned I've done this a few times from my personal experience and I've read a I've read a decent amount about it here are some things I think would be helpful first thing if you currently have a job right now you're employed and your new job is asking hey how much do you make it your current position don't tell you don't need to there's no reason there's nothing beneficial for you telling them what you're currently making right now the reason probably one of the reasons you're looking for a new job is that you want to pay bump usually you can get that by jumping around by job hopping it's the sad state that we live in but it's true so they're asking you they say thanks you just tell me real quick maybe a job headhunters asking for it just so they have a point of reference they just want to make sure that everybody's happy and that you're gonna get they'll get you for not having to pay as much as maybe you might want so instead say something like you know I trust that you'll provide me an offer that takes into account my experience and the current market conditions that's it and I'll say like well we just really want to give you a baseline something to start with just say you know we'll just throw something out I won't be offended something like that because the balls in their court now not in yours you know they don't have something to pin the low end of their of their offer with you know if you give them their current salary they're gonna know exactly where to start from the offer and just give you maybe five ten percent I did this when I was job one of my previous jobs I'd I refused to tell HR my current salary at the new place and they ended up offering me like twenty percent more than I was currently making and I was able to counter that another eight percent so it was like almost a 30 percent pay bump by changing jobs and there was no way that if I had told them how much I was making it my current job they would have offered me 20 percent more it wouldn't happened so you can avoid telling them that information I highly recommend that you're in the negotiation phase so take a step back and think about this you've gone through the rest of my face you've gone through the interview they want you it takes a long time for an employer to interview people and make a job offer and say that this is somebody we want to work with and they've put a lot of skin in the game to get you to that point so therefore you should always ask it never hurts to ask if you're polite about it asking for whatever is important to you what's what's important to you do you want more vacation time maybe that's something that's the go Schiphol do you are you working for a start-up and equity is negotiable are you do you want a higher salary that's a common one so asking never hurts like counter whatever offer you're given you should always ask for more there's really no reason not to you want to do what's best for you and it's best for that company to you know they they're gonna say they don't want to pay you that much they they want to be frugal and and be lean and all that but like if you want to stay in a place for a long time you want to be happy with with your your income and your salary and the benefits and everything else so I think it's a good thing you know if you're if you wish like if you go into the job starting and wishing you had asked for more it's not a great place to start off and then you're constantly trying to catch up just that's for more than in the interview process they're not gonna say get out of here ever so okay this is I really appreciate your offers or any way you could move on this if they say no they say no and you can say okay I'll accept sorry nobody gets burned okay so how much how much should you get paid I probably should have started with this I don't know I don't know how much you should get paid it totally depends on how much experience you have and more than that where you live if you live in Silicon Valley I would expect a huge difference in salary compared to Mobile Alabama it's just the the geographies are just so different and the pay is so different depending on where you live it's probably also the cost of living is a lot cheaper in some places so your salary should reflect not only the hotness of the market but also the cost of living for that particular market so if you know if you're if you really have no idea kind of like what to ask for what is a good salary for your area for that job for your experience check out glassdoor.com great website and you can really get a lot of good information from there this is just for the United States to like I know if you're talking about internationally how much FPGA designers if digital designers should be expected to make I really don't know don't have a time experience you know in the in the US if you have five years of experience I'd be expecting that you're making over a hundred thousand dollars probably it's a good career you know you can with another grad degree be making six figures in a few years relative with relative ease so yeah it's great what is it like what it's working for as an FPGA engineer day to day like it's fun I liked it you know you're kind of a very super niche job where a lot of people say you work on a multi-discipline team a lot of different engineers software engineers program managers now they might know what FPGA stands for and that you sit in front of a computer and you make them do stuff but on a day-to-day level you know they don't they don't really have a great feel for exactly what it is that you're doing a lot of the time so you're kind of like this I don't know kind of some mythic mystical powers where you can just bend the ones and zeros to your whim and and that's cool so you'd if you also have a lot of control over your own working environment so if you like tools don't tools you can usually change all that stuff because you're like a small team working on on your particular PGA design so you a lot of control in general to the way I usually divide my time if I have an FPGA design to do I spent a lot more time writing test bench code and simulation code than I do writing the actual RTL implementation of the of the module so I would say it's probably 30% of my time I'll spend writing RTL 50% of the time I'll spend writing test bench code and simulations to exercise that RTL and then the last 20% maybe I'll be on the physical hardware but in general I don't like being on hardware I don't like having a go in the lab and run tests and set up scope probes and all that stuff so if I can avoid that I absolutely will I'd rather just sit in front of a computer and write tests because the other thing about tests is you can put them as part of a regression suite and rerun regression and you know check if your test pass or fail self checking test benches are great so you know get into that but in general you know you spend you spend a lot of time headphones on just cranking out code I'm it's kind of soothing in some way what about working for a start-up I currently work for a start-up and it's definitely different from other large corporations that I've worked for in the past startups probably don't pay as much as a traditional large company but you have this lottery ticket in your back pocket which is equity most startups will give you some small portion of ownership in stock options in the company so what that means is that maybe someday in the future if the company is extremely valuable those stock options will be extremely valuable more than likely they will be worth nothing because like 90 percent of startups end up failing I mean that's just the sad truth to it but yours well probably so anyway I I have some stock options I look at it as kind of like a lottery ticket maybe it'll pay out maybe I won't but I don't bank on it as a side note when you are interviewing and you're getting equity in a company for it you're interviewing first startup as part of that negotiation phase you can you know everything is negotiable and including equity so maybe they can't maybe a start-up is really cash-strapped and they can't give you a higher salary but they can move on the equity and give you a little bit more stock options so never hurts to ask again back to that those are all the tips I have for how to negotiate for a great job offer if that's been helpful for you please consider becoming a patreon I'll put a link to the patreon page in the description below or if you want to play with FPGA some more maybe check out my go board which I created via Kickstarter it's been really successful I've sold hundreds of them and people really enjoy working with it so check that out too thanks very much

Channel: nandland

Views: 5,795

Keywords: job, negotiate, salary, engineering, fpga, career, tips

Id: IW6hj5cu_nQ

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019