That post really doesn’t make sense to me. It’s always in your interest to shop around. The author calls them “collectors”, sounds like he’s upset he loses good candidates over money and wants to rationalize his loss.
Yep it makes no sense. In fact, normally if they can pay your more it's a good sign. The place with more money is more likely to have a better career, all else unknown, because they probably make more money (or are well funded) and therefore they desperately need the best people so are willing to stump up for it. There is a bigger causal link between your work and the impact on the company. In such places, expect to work with other good people.
The only reason it is a bad sign is if they are paying more money simply to compensate for insane working hours or bad culture. That should be sniffable on glassdoor, or with a few well placed questions. Or look for the warning signs. E.g. "We have an onsite gym because we don't want people to leave the building all day".
Like many others, I disagree with several points of that article.
First, even if you're dead set to work at company X, it's a good idea to get offers from companies Y and Z to help you negotiate. If X is primed for success, as the article recommends, then X should have no problem matching up because a good hire should bring in many times more revenue than what could be saved by pinching pennies on the offer. As a candidate, it's also great to be in a situation where you have multiple offers in the same range, because that allows you to take comp out of the equation and make your decision purely based on which company and role would be the best fit.
Second, it's OK if the first company you work at fails. Early in your career, learning as much as you can is more important than success or failure IMO, and failure can be a tremendous learning opportunity. The article recommends joining a company that's already almost certain to succeed; this means all the critical problems were solved before you joined, and all that's left is to execute. It's great to learn how to execute well, but it's also far from being the whole picture.
Well on CEO level that might be true (I realise that's not what he talking about though). It seems pay of top level exec positions follows very different patterns than normal folks. It's used for signalling status. I know of at least one instance where the head of the board said to increase the salary offer to a CEO candidate because "we want to be the company in the country who offers the highest CEO salary".
I don't know about the first negotiation anecdote, but I can kinda see what Andy means here. I don't think pay is the primary thing I get out of a job, they'll all basically pay enough to live really well. Feeling good about what I do at work, learning new skills for the sake of learning, having a positive environment are all far more important to me. I've met a lot of people in school and at work who are just there to make as much money as possible, and I've always found that incredibly depressing. I think both our views can be valid at once, but I don't think they're a good culture fit together.
Its also depressing to pick a job not based on pay, and see how friends with similar skills who do optimize for pay make a million extra over the span of a couple years.
Not a couple of years, but a valid point. I've always told myself I'm focussed on my compensation integrated over 10 years. This can allow for some trade off between money today and money tomorrow.
