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I'd like to mention that even as an employee, focusing on and emphasizing value makes it a lot easier to get paid more than focusing on cost/hours.

Example: a company I worked at spent about 2 years trying to get a project off the ground. It would involve hiring a bunch of consultants for $1.2MM, not to mention all the senior management time that was involved in approvals, spec interviews, etc.

6 months after I got there, they still hadn't managed to even get the project started. I spent a few days asking around to find out what the company actually wanted to achieve with this project. I then spent 2 hours implementing something that gave them the exact result they were looking for.

When negotiating a raise, do you think I mentioned how I spent a week building an Excel Pivot Table? Or do you think I talked about how I saved the company at least 2 million dollars and successfully completed a project that they'd been trying to start for nearly 2 years in under 3 months? (In reality, under a week-but I didn't want to make it sound too easy).

And that's how I became the youngest Sr. Analyst at the company before I left :)




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