This is the crux of negotiating. The person with more options has more power. There's really only one way to get a raise: pay me X or I walk. If yay, good, if nay, walk.

A subtle way to reinforce your words is drawing on the famous million-dollar Amdahl coffee cup:

http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-million-dollar-...

In this case, find a friend at Google/Apple/whatever and ask them if you can have some employee-only branded stuff.

As an employee of a company, I'm paid salary for my time.

I'll take a pay cut for more equity if I want it, not for nothing.

If I take risk, I get rewarded with ownership, but if I'm paid cash, why do I honestly care what happens to a company.

This isn't some fairytale, we're all here to get paid, and employees​ aren't your buffer for bad cash flow management, that's the responsibility of owners and management.

Blaming management make it sound like you have never owned a company.

When cash is getting low two choices. Paycuts or firings. Pros and cons to both.

In the OP sounds like they arent that drastic yet. Just no raises. Seems not that dire all things considered.

Not holding management responsible makes me think you might have owned a company.

Let me spell out the compact that undergirds capitalism: employees don't take risks and are paid a constant stream of cash, owner's do take risk, and it is up to them to ensure there is enough capital buffer to meet their constant stream obligations. Employees do the work, management/owners ensure they get paid.

Ok so you are argued that OP or one of his coworkers should be fired, so OP can get his 3% raise. And on top of that, his workload now went up 10%, as there are less people to do the work.

Got it. Sounds like good decision making.

From what I read, throwaway-sc is being paid 100% of salary. They're just not being paid 103.5% of salary after a raise that's been deferred.

While there are certainly things to worry about, this is not a case of employees not being paid.

Funny thing is that salary changes with a raise, so technically they'd be < 100% of their promised benefits after July, and past that, who knows?

Not the time or place.

What? Why not? The OP is explicitly asking for advice. My advice is to work for a business that makes money.

That's not the advice you gave. In fact you gave no advice, you simply proclaimed your superiority when it comes to past decision making, in that you only worked for companies that make money.

Your reply was intentionally snarky at best; obnoxiously insulting, demeaning and entirely non-useful at worst.

You should have stated it this way in your original comment. Instead your comment comes a across as snarky and unhelpful.

Would you also recommend that he eat food for sustenance, and continue metabolizing it with oxygen?

Strongly concur.

Also make this a yearly habit, so you stay on the ball, know where the market is at, and become comfortable leaving at a moment's notice to avoid this life changing anxiety you might be feeling.

Once you do it regularly, it's no big deal. Companies hire and fire dozens of people a year, it shouldn't be that different for you.

This is brilliant. My day just got so much better.

Pretty much. Ever notice that anytime anyone wants to "fix" hiring they end up developing systems that are just cancer.

If you can't figure out if you want to hire someone in < 1 hr talking to them, you suck at hiring.

I really disagree with that. You might not have time to have code written and completed in that interview. You might have someone who just knows that question but has limited knowledge, you might have someone who can code but has an uncommon failure on your problem. I have interviewed tons of people who can talk about technology but can't do it themselves. If you are hiring people for a coding job, they have to code. People who say they are architects or first level manager will have a really hard time doing a good job if they don't understand the technology themselves (I guess its not impossible, but its harder).

Like I said, you just suck at hiring.

so what do you do to filter people out with such certainty? I worked at a startup, and the ceo was dead certain he could figure it out in a short conversation with someone, if they'd be good or not. he was certain we should hire 2 people, i was certain we should not, i was right both times, he was wrong. But I've been wrong before. Being certain you can do it in an hour probably means you are overconfident.

We all do.

It's less about whether you want to hire that person. It's which of 100 people you want to hire. You need to have SOME filter prior to wasting 99 hours.

If you've got 100 engineers applying, please forward me the other 99. I've got some positions to fill.

Amen. Thing is, now you have to keep records on how you arrived at that decision.

There's really only two things to programming-as-a-job:

1)How much dog does somebody have in 'em? Determination frequently trumps everything else.

2) How good are they at knowing when to back up a notch, punt or roll it all back?

You don't figure that out with fizzbuzz.

So you see a high developer attrition rate, and go, I know, I'll fill it with 3 month code bootcamp graduates?

No wonder their attrition is so high. Apparently they are incapable of observing the fact they are just an awful place to work, and instead of fixing that, they just shovel more developers into their meat grinder.

You make a cogent point - these behemoths will have inertia problems.

For anyone who doesn't get this, watch Black Mirror.

rot13: V jngpurq gur rcvfbqr, bcrarq UA naq gurer vg jnf. Ba pbaprcghny yriry vg jnf bar gb bar znccvat orgjrra gur rcvfbqr naq vzcyrzragngvba.

The more time goes on, the more confident I become in the notion that I am currently living in an episode of Black Mirror.

You mean like the government?

You pay in taxes, government dispenses research funds, you don't know where the money is from.

Sure, more government funding would be nice, but no, the idea described is not really like government science funding at all.

There's a key difference in the suggestion, compared to the government: there could be many such organizations, each having different priorities and values which would lead to them funding different things. People and corporations interested in making a difference would have a choice.

They can't win because they are on the wrong side of history and they are fighting dirty by using stealth operations to turn the conversation from diet to exercise. As if the average American can, or will, exercise enough to even burn off 1 additional can of soda on top of their already caloric rich diets.

What they are doing is no different from the various operations Big Tobacco did in the past to misinform, dissuade or deflect the conversation on cigarettes.

So you think their should be no more soda in the world?

I understand the health costs of sugary drinks, but personally I want to live in a world where I can have one if and when I want to. I don't drink a lot of soda (maybe one a week), but there are certain situations where I find them really enjoyable. I don't want them to disappear.

I think the quality of life will go down if we get rid of all junk food in the world. I know we do a poor job of eating and drinking in moderation, but I don't think the solution is to just have it not be available.

I do believe that there should be no more soda in the world. At least, we should wipe it out, get everyone through withdrawal, then reintroduce it.

Sugar and caffeine are addictive. We are given these things from a very young age and have very little say in whether we are addicted to them (not to mention, massive amounts of marketing).

The fewer foods I eat, the better I feel. So many people are hooked on this stuff and aren't even aware that it is poisoning them (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, as well as headaches, mood swings, nasal congestion).

I wouldn't want to be a dictator and deprive people who are making a conscious choice, but I would get rid of it in order to give the people who are trapped the opportunity to experience life without it.

This is always such a slippery slope, though. There ARE a lot of people who are already using soda in a healthy manner; they drink one occasionally, and are not addicted. They, too, would be swept up in any outright ban (no matter how temporary).

Where would it stop, then? Almost everything there is has some people that are addicted to it and use it too much; television, video games, social media, etc. Do we implement global bans to protect the people who are unable to control themselves? Or do we need to do something different?

Step 1. Claim parent argument is, instead, some strawman.

Step 2. Argue against strawman.

I wasn't trying to create a strawman. The claim that I was arguing against said "They can't win because they are on the wrong side of history"

So the commenter claims "they can't win". That means that even if they stopped all the PR work defending sugar, they still wouldn't win and they would still be on the wrong side of history.

If they have no way to win, then the only thing they can do is stop existing at all.

If the commenter supports their right to exist as a company making sugary drinks, then there IS a way to win.

Then the problem is you jumped ahead too much. The "can't win" part came from what that guy was responding to. Your parent argument was just "no, people won't give them a break because what they're doing with PR and marketing is morally reprehensible". That's it.

He's responsible for what he says. But you're also responsible for what you understand.

He was very clever with that wasn't he?

Everyone should be free to consume whatever they want, so long as they know what they want is killing them, and there are no distortions by the purveyors of such products that they are anything other than what they are - namely bad for you.

You want to smoke? Go ahead. You want to get obese and severely shorten both your life and its quality by consuming caloric dense nutrient deficient drinks/foods? Go right on ahead. It's your life to screw up.

But don't you dare stand there and tell me that letting these corporations that profit from the damage people do to themselves be free to run around going "OH NO cigarettes are totally fine! OH NO diet isn't the issue - just exercise more - here have a coke". Kids are literally dying because of this shit, and I frankly won't stand by it.

What I am against is systematic and dirty propaganda operations that directly harm the national interest for trivial sums of profit by lying to the population through their teeth and in turn inflicting untold amounts of misery on millions of our citizens.

I wasn't clever at all; if you think that the sugary drink companies are fine to exist as long as they don't push propaganda about sugary drinks, then there IS a way to win - all they have to do is stop the propaganda.

That isn't what your statement I replied to said... you said there was NO way for them to win.

We're seeing that in San Francisco with Proposition V that's suppose to be a sugar beverage tax but the opposition is spinning it into an across the board grocery tax.

This sounds a lot like how many large tech firms operate. I'm not saying that you are wrong, but that it's easy to point out "big" whatevery and forget where our dollar bills come from. Silicon Valley is by no means clean of business practices that include misinformation and "disruptive" anti-competitive practices. Can we really blame Big Soda forever?

"Many companies are just as bad" isn't an argument for anything.

Except there are decades of misinformation that have already happened -- that fact completely undermines whatever point you are trying to make about the innocence of these lobbying efforts by big Soda.