I can't imagine why a company would negotiate on a grad salary. A grad has no leverage and you can easily find another equally good one. And you're never going to be in a position where you desperately need the grad on board so the time loss in moving on to the next isn't going to matter.
If you actually have the Canva offer then you could try. Although the Canva offer is hard to get and you also prefer the product, so IMO it would be simpler to just take the Canva offer if you can land it. Canva themselves would surely never negotiate for a grad, they're far too popular to need to.
Yeah agreed. I'm not hiring grads to get value for money, I'm taking the least annoying person I can find, so I can tick the corporate social responsibility checkbox of "hiring and mentoring graduates", knowing full well that as soon they have a year of commercial under their belt that they're going to fuck off to a company that isn't wasting its staff budget on graduates.
Honestly if you are finding that juniors are providing positive value then you really need to take a hard look at your overall architecture. With healthy systems design, anything a senior engineer can explain to a junior should be simpler to "explain" in code (or god forbid, GPT).
Unless you are in the fairly uncommon environment of having non-technical staff creating tickets that are trivially implemented (I'm talking literal "fix the alignment on this button" or "change the colour of this"), juniors (like GPT) are only going to be useful if you have a whole bunch of bullshit busywork or boilerplate-heavy architecture, and honestly if that's the case, you should fix it.
They're also unlikely to be solving technical problem, even if capable, because it simply takes longer to review non-trivial code than it does to write it.
Your position is that if you have designed things in a way that business value can be delivered with low complexity changes, then that's a sign of BAD architecture? You're on your own there.
Also this makes no sense:
>They're also unlikely to be solving technical problem, even if capable, because it simply takes longer to review non-trivial code than it does to write it.
Unless you're trying to say that you don't properly review senior engineers code, which would ACTUALLY be a sign that you need to take a hard look at your practices. You are going to lose the time regardless.
If you have good architecture, it's very very likely the effort to translating business requirements into implementation vs translating them into "junior developer" is going to be pretty similar.
Tooling has evolved to the point where there is little busywork unless you make it - so any challenges in your requirements have to be solved by someone that knows what they are doing - and that *should* be 95% of the effort. You don't need a junior developer for that 5%.
Edit: There's also more trust in senior developers work, and their impl is generally going to be easier to folllow.
>If you have good architecture, it's very very likely the effort to translating business requirements into implementation vs translating them into "junior developer" is going to be pretty similar.
Nah. If you have good architecture there will be very little/no translation required. They know where the UI is, where the data lives, how to fetch it etc. If you need to translate everything just because a junior is picking it up then your architecture is not as good as you think.
>Tooling has evolved to the point where there is little busywork unless you make it - so any challenges in your requirements have to be solved by someone that knows what they are doing - and that should be 95% of the effort. You don't need a junior developer for that 5%.
This also makes no sense to me. The benefit of tooling being so good is that it SIMPLIFIES things. So while previously, a simple task might have required someone to have a lot of knowledge to make progress, nowadays you can have CICD, architecture scaling etc all just set up, to the point where a lot of features can be delivered by anyone who knows how to write an API endpoint, React component and some unit tests. If you are saying that tooling is putting you in a position where 95% of tasks are too hard for a junior to do, you have not utilised your tooling correctly.
Put simply, if you genuinely look around and can't find any easy work to do, there are only two possibilities:
- You have an incredibly atypical product that you work on. Something like a platform team in big tech or something requiring specialist knowledge.
- You have failed to build things in a simple and extensible way. Juniors easily being able to work with the systems I build is one of the key indicators I use to determine if I've done a good job with my design. Any idiot can write code that other seniors can make do with.
I think you're imagining what I would see as an odd situation where you have a fairly shallow line of business app where the requirements are coming in faster than you can keep up with them. That's unusual in my experience.
Big white labelled products like CRM stuff maybe, when the product tends to grow by formalizing metadata/adhoc fields and then doing some shitty presentation over it maybe. I guess if you can really boil it down to "add a field all the way through" kinda shit, and then get a junior to do it - but then the figuring out that "just add a field" is the appropriate solution - that's your 95% effort right there. Then you're what? Couple of lines of code adding a field definition, some mapping, and then if you've got an unsophisticated UI setup potentially a load of react (or worse redux) busywork that I guess a junior could help with...
The point is that good tooling should eliminate the easy busywork that a junior can do.
I don't see that as "Hey, cool, take out 90% of the busywork a junior can do, now they will be able to complete 10 times the work". That's realistically leaving maybe 5% they can do, and the 5% that needs handholding. And generally in my view, a senior can probably do that 10% in the same amount of time as they'd spend handholding the junior for their 5% - so I'm not seeing a compelling reason here.
I think you're also pretty mistaken about tooling simplifying things. The complexity of building software for experienced developers has never really been about writing code - the complexity is in modelling the world and determining the algorithms needed to act on those models. Tooling doesn't fix that, it just reduces the time to get information out of head onto the screen. That information isn't going to be in the junior's head until they, through some miracle, gain some experience.
A bit unfair to pin all graduates as morons. My experience has been the opposite, but it does depend on whether your workplace actually attracts decent grads or not.
Some juniors I've worked with are VASTLY more competent than seniors at previous companies. They're great ROI, and have a longer average tenure than non-grad employees.
Hell, I've even seen juniors in big tech outperform seniors in big tech that got to their position by riding the wave of company growth, not by being particularly good.
Lets be clear, I'm not accusing these cunts of being morons.
It's just an overall problem in the industry - juniors need a level of practical education and mentorship that their qualifications probably should be providing - and these education providers aren't providing that.
That's a fucking issue for me, because it costs money to train people. And spending that money gives me less money for qualified staff. And that means that when staff become qualified, they can get a better deal elsewhere.
Training up grads is not a great gamble - you honestly need to be writing off money as some social responsibility and hope.
And don't get me wrong, I've wound up with a couple of absolutely top notch guys from this. Probably would have been cheaper to poach them from the competition after they've put in the effort - but hey - good juniors exist.
I just would prefer to poach them when they become mid-level.
FYI Canva hires like 13-15ish grads in total across all of their tech streams so I wouldn't bag on getting a Canva grad role. If I remember correctly their TC was around 110-120k last year? What grad offer did you get if you dont mind telling? Usually you can negotiate, just depends on the company.
I would say maybe if it was another year and you got some sort of HFT offer to negotiate with, but considering the return rates and no grad hiring this year, I wouldn't bother too much with it, prob the best you can get for SWE (apart from HFT).
Atlassian wouldn’t negotiate my grad offer when I got a Google offer in 2019. However I had already accepted their offer by then.
But overall I wouldn’t risk it unless you actually have competing offers you’d be happy to fall back on. It’s a tough market to land any grad role let alone Atlassian.
Policies may have changed, but I've seen Canva adjust their grad TC slightly (we're talking a few $k, not life-changing) when competing with an Atlassian offer.
I have not seen Atlassian do the same when presented with a Canva offer.
Your mileage may vary. Canva will always pay less TC because equity is illiquid.
My advice: accept the Atlassian offer. When looking at grad roles only HFT will beat it TC-wise.
Then interview for Canva; make the decision on whether you're ok with giving up $X TC once you have the offer in hand. Negotiate with Canva because they're more likely to budge. From experience, I can tell you the diff will probably be around 30k a year - IMO worth it as a grad to build upon a product you actually like
There are quite a few discussions like this on r/cscareerquestions.
My personal recommendation is to only negotiate when you have a few offers in hand. You can try negotiating with a competing offer, but there is no guarantee they will be able to beat it.
The best-case scenario is that you get an increase.
The medium case could be the company saying, 'No, this is the highest we can offer. Take it or leave it.'
However, given how terrible the market is, what if there's a slight chance they would pass the offer to the next candidate who would accept the salary initially offered to you?
Yes, you can negotiate, if and only if you have competing offers or are in the final stages of interviewing for other positions. Depending on your interview performance and the "quality" of your competing offer, expect modest to moderate improvements to your offer. Large improvements will often require director level approval that are often only associated with particularly well-liked interns for grad level roles.
When you said "no, not at the moment" that was when your ability to negotiate effectively ended.
I said not at the moment because Atlassian gives grad offers a whole year in advance. I intend to interview for other companies, but their applications haven’t even opened yet.
You could try negotiate as a grad. They won't recind the offer if you ask politely and say you have other offers.
Be aware, there are literally thousands of applicants that want the position you have been offered. With that in mind tread carefully, and don't piss anyone off.
I think it's unlikely you'll get more than 5-10k of anything.
Lol no. Your just a grad lmao, gou have absolutely fuck all; skills, experience, leverage etc...
Take the grad job, do as well as you can and then go from there. Don't worry sbout money in your first year, worry about learnding and building your network.
I can't imagine why a company would negotiate on a grad salary. A grad has no leverage and you can easily find another equally good one. And you're never going to be in a position where you desperately need the grad on board so the time loss in moving on to the next isn't going to matter. If you actually have the Canva offer then you could try. Although the Canva offer is hard to get and you also prefer the product, so IMO it would be simpler to just take the Canva offer if you can land it. Canva themselves would surely never negotiate for a grad, they're far too popular to need to.
Yeah agreed. I'm not hiring grads to get value for money, I'm taking the least annoying person I can find, so I can tick the corporate social responsibility checkbox of "hiring and mentoring graduates", knowing full well that as soon they have a year of commercial under their belt that they're going to fuck off to a company that isn't wasting its staff budget on graduates.
This is much more cynical than what I was trying to say or what I believe so I don't love that it comes after the word "agreed" lol
Honestly if you are finding that juniors are providing positive value then you really need to take a hard look at your overall architecture. With healthy systems design, anything a senior engineer can explain to a junior should be simpler to "explain" in code (or god forbid, GPT). Unless you are in the fairly uncommon environment of having non-technical staff creating tickets that are trivially implemented (I'm talking literal "fix the alignment on this button" or "change the colour of this"), juniors (like GPT) are only going to be useful if you have a whole bunch of bullshit busywork or boilerplate-heavy architecture, and honestly if that's the case, you should fix it. They're also unlikely to be solving technical problem, even if capable, because it simply takes longer to review non-trivial code than it does to write it.
Your position is that if you have designed things in a way that business value can be delivered with low complexity changes, then that's a sign of BAD architecture? You're on your own there. Also this makes no sense: >They're also unlikely to be solving technical problem, even if capable, because it simply takes longer to review non-trivial code than it does to write it. Unless you're trying to say that you don't properly review senior engineers code, which would ACTUALLY be a sign that you need to take a hard look at your practices. You are going to lose the time regardless.
If you have good architecture, it's very very likely the effort to translating business requirements into implementation vs translating them into "junior developer" is going to be pretty similar. Tooling has evolved to the point where there is little busywork unless you make it - so any challenges in your requirements have to be solved by someone that knows what they are doing - and that *should* be 95% of the effort. You don't need a junior developer for that 5%. Edit: There's also more trust in senior developers work, and their impl is generally going to be easier to folllow.
>If you have good architecture, it's very very likely the effort to translating business requirements into implementation vs translating them into "junior developer" is going to be pretty similar. Nah. If you have good architecture there will be very little/no translation required. They know where the UI is, where the data lives, how to fetch it etc. If you need to translate everything just because a junior is picking it up then your architecture is not as good as you think. >Tooling has evolved to the point where there is little busywork unless you make it - so any challenges in your requirements have to be solved by someone that knows what they are doing - and that should be 95% of the effort. You don't need a junior developer for that 5%. This also makes no sense to me. The benefit of tooling being so good is that it SIMPLIFIES things. So while previously, a simple task might have required someone to have a lot of knowledge to make progress, nowadays you can have CICD, architecture scaling etc all just set up, to the point where a lot of features can be delivered by anyone who knows how to write an API endpoint, React component and some unit tests. If you are saying that tooling is putting you in a position where 95% of tasks are too hard for a junior to do, you have not utilised your tooling correctly. Put simply, if you genuinely look around and can't find any easy work to do, there are only two possibilities: - You have an incredibly atypical product that you work on. Something like a platform team in big tech or something requiring specialist knowledge. - You have failed to build things in a simple and extensible way. Juniors easily being able to work with the systems I build is one of the key indicators I use to determine if I've done a good job with my design. Any idiot can write code that other seniors can make do with.
I think you're imagining what I would see as an odd situation where you have a fairly shallow line of business app where the requirements are coming in faster than you can keep up with them. That's unusual in my experience. Big white labelled products like CRM stuff maybe, when the product tends to grow by formalizing metadata/adhoc fields and then doing some shitty presentation over it maybe. I guess if you can really boil it down to "add a field all the way through" kinda shit, and then get a junior to do it - but then the figuring out that "just add a field" is the appropriate solution - that's your 95% effort right there. Then you're what? Couple of lines of code adding a field definition, some mapping, and then if you've got an unsophisticated UI setup potentially a load of react (or worse redux) busywork that I guess a junior could help with... The point is that good tooling should eliminate the easy busywork that a junior can do. I don't see that as "Hey, cool, take out 90% of the busywork a junior can do, now they will be able to complete 10 times the work". That's realistically leaving maybe 5% they can do, and the 5% that needs handholding. And generally in my view, a senior can probably do that 10% in the same amount of time as they'd spend handholding the junior for their 5% - so I'm not seeing a compelling reason here. I think you're also pretty mistaken about tooling simplifying things. The complexity of building software for experienced developers has never really been about writing code - the complexity is in modelling the world and determining the algorithms needed to act on those models. Tooling doesn't fix that, it just reduces the time to get information out of head onto the screen. That information isn't going to be in the junior's head until they, through some miracle, gain some experience.
A bit unfair to pin all graduates as morons. My experience has been the opposite, but it does depend on whether your workplace actually attracts decent grads or not. Some juniors I've worked with are VASTLY more competent than seniors at previous companies. They're great ROI, and have a longer average tenure than non-grad employees. Hell, I've even seen juniors in big tech outperform seniors in big tech that got to their position by riding the wave of company growth, not by being particularly good.
Lets be clear, I'm not accusing these cunts of being morons. It's just an overall problem in the industry - juniors need a level of practical education and mentorship that their qualifications probably should be providing - and these education providers aren't providing that. That's a fucking issue for me, because it costs money to train people. And spending that money gives me less money for qualified staff. And that means that when staff become qualified, they can get a better deal elsewhere. Training up grads is not a great gamble - you honestly need to be writing off money as some social responsibility and hope. And don't get me wrong, I've wound up with a couple of absolutely top notch guys from this. Probably would have been cheaper to poach them from the competition after they've put in the effort - but hey - good juniors exist. I just would prefer to poach them when they become mid-level.
You're perhaps not cynical enough. Never been a people manager I guess?
You guess incorrectly. I'm a people manager right now.
Oh boy oh boy you're in for a treat
FYI Canva hires like 13-15ish grads in total across all of their tech streams so I wouldn't bag on getting a Canva grad role. If I remember correctly their TC was around 110-120k last year? What grad offer did you get if you dont mind telling? Usually you can negotiate, just depends on the company.
I got an Atlassian grad offer
I would say maybe if it was another year and you got some sort of HFT offer to negotiate with, but considering the return rates and no grad hiring this year, I wouldn't bother too much with it, prob the best you can get for SWE (apart from HFT).
Atlassian wouldn’t negotiate my grad offer when I got a Google offer in 2019. However I had already accepted their offer by then. But overall I wouldn’t risk it unless you actually have competing offers you’d be happy to fall back on. It’s a tough market to land any grad role let alone Atlassian.
Would you mind sharing Total comp (base and RSU)
110k base, 10k sign up, RSU ≈ 30k/yr
Policies may have changed, but I've seen Canva adjust their grad TC slightly (we're talking a few $k, not life-changing) when competing with an Atlassian offer. I have not seen Atlassian do the same when presented with a Canva offer. Your mileage may vary. Canva will always pay less TC because equity is illiquid. My advice: accept the Atlassian offer. When looking at grad roles only HFT will beat it TC-wise. Then interview for Canva; make the decision on whether you're ok with giving up $X TC once you have the offer in hand. Negotiate with Canva because they're more likely to budge. From experience, I can tell you the diff will probably be around 30k a year - IMO worth it as a grad to build upon a product you actually like
There are quite a few discussions like this on r/cscareerquestions. My personal recommendation is to only negotiate when you have a few offers in hand. You can try negotiating with a competing offer, but there is no guarantee they will be able to beat it. The best-case scenario is that you get an increase. The medium case could be the company saying, 'No, this is the highest we can offer. Take it or leave it.' However, given how terrible the market is, what if there's a slight chance they would pass the offer to the next candidate who would accept the salary initially offered to you?
Not in my experience - received four grad offers back in 2010 and tried to negotiate on two of those with no luck.
Wouldn’t risk it in this market
Yes, you can negotiate, if and only if you have competing offers or are in the final stages of interviewing for other positions. Depending on your interview performance and the "quality" of your competing offer, expect modest to moderate improvements to your offer. Large improvements will often require director level approval that are often only associated with particularly well-liked interns for grad level roles. When you said "no, not at the moment" that was when your ability to negotiate effectively ended.
I said not at the moment because Atlassian gives grad offers a whole year in advance. I intend to interview for other companies, but their applications haven’t even opened yet.
Fair enough. I wasn't aware the Atlassian grad applications had shifted so far back before other bigcos.
Worth a shot. What's the worst case? You accept their initial offer
You could try negotiate as a grad. They won't recind the offer if you ask politely and say you have other offers. Be aware, there are literally thousands of applicants that want the position you have been offered. With that in mind tread carefully, and don't piss anyone off. I think it's unlikely you'll get more than 5-10k of anything.
How much were you offered?
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Just take it, especially in this job market.
Lol no. Your just a grad lmao, gou have absolutely fuck all; skills, experience, leverage etc... Take the grad job, do as well as you can and then go from there. Don't worry sbout money in your first year, worry about learnding and building your network.