The Walk of Shame: Salary Negotiation Blind Spots

Life Lesson #23: Avoiding misguided salary negotiation strategies

Will Rogers once said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

We’ve all been witness to incidents of misplaced judgment, ranging from minor slip-ups to the foolhardy competing for the next Darwin Award.  While I’ve always strived to avoid life’s more dire pitfalls through vicarious learning, I’ve not been immune to the consequences of regrettable decisions.

The Story: Flashback 20 years to my first day on the job inaugurating my professional career – the real world.

I was dressed for success in a double-breasted, Geoffrey Beene, charcoal-gray suit; sporting a brand new pair of Bostonian cap-toe, oxford dress shoes.  The ensemble was perfectly finished with a classic Pierre Cardin silk tie.

Sharply dressed, I headed downtown to a Seattle skyscraper, prepared to make my mark on the business community as a freshly minted college graduate.

As I entered the elevator, I glanced at the mirror noting again how sharp I looked.  Confidence was pumping through my veins as I selected floor 32.

To my chagrin, though, the elevator failed to stop at floor 32.  Unbeknown to me, floor 32 was a secure floor, which required an elevator security pass.

I hastily pushed buttons of adjacent floors until one finally lit up.

Bingo – Floor 37!

Cleverly, I entered the stairwell of floor 37 and prepared for a 5-floor descent.  But that is when things began to go terribly wrong.

After a brief walk down to floor 32, I grabbed the door handle expecting it to turn.  Instead, my blood froze when I realized the door was locked.  Despite my concerns, I was reasonably confident I could simply reenter on floor 37 since it wasn’t a secure floor.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a gross miscalculation.

My cries went unanswered as they echoed throughout the desolate stairwell on floor 37.  Even when I frantically shook the handle, the door remained locked despite my desperate efforts.

That is also when I realized my polyester-cotton blend dress shirt did not afford the breathability the situation required.  Moreover, my stifling wool suit further compounded the mounting crisis.

After taking a moment to regain my composure; I stripped off my now suffocating jacket, loosened my suddenly strangling tie, removed my vice-like dress shoes, and prepared for a 37-floor descent.

It was somewhere around floor 18 that I realized two important things.  First, I wasn’t going to negotiate an additional 18 flights and still be presentable for work.  And, there were emergency telephones every five floors.

I hiked back up to floor 20, swallowed what little pride I had left and phoned security.  When the guard finally opened the stairwell door and liberated me from my steel and concrete tomb, the feeling of humiliation was quickly replaced with an overwhelming sense of relief.

My newfound hero subsequently escorted me by elevator to my new office on floor 32.  And that’s how I made my first impression in ‘the real world’.

The Breakdown: I’d like to say the stairwell debacle was the only example of poor judgment involving my first professional job.  In fact, accepting the position in the first place turned out to be a rather regrettable decision.  While hindsight is always 20/20, the focus of this post actually concerns one of the more critical steps before accepting a new job: salary negotiation.

The compensation package I was offered included a base salary and a modest signing bonus intended to help new college graduates build a professional wardrobe.  I was a little underwhelmed with the salary and attempted to negotiate a larger base, but without success.

Next, casting aside everything I had learned about the time value of money, I successfully negotiated an increase in base salary equal to the signing bonus in lieu of actual receipt of the aforementioned signing bonus.  I foolishly believed the higher base salary would serve me better in the long run when it came to the compounding effect of future raises and promotions.

Theoretically, the premise of my negotiation logic would prove itself true over time.  However, it would’ve also required too many other variables to perfectly fall into place.  In the end, the job was a terrible fit for a myriad of reasons and I tendered my notice after just a few short months.

Accordingly, my negotiating prowess helped me secure the loss of the vast majority of that original signing bonus.  Had I not negotiated away my signing bonus, perhaps I could have applied some of it toward more breathable, 100% cotton dress shirts and a pair of more comfortable dress shoes.

Sharing this story is timely, as several surprising articles about Millennials’ unconventional salary negotiation strategies have popped up recently.  In essence, there is a growing trend of Millennials negotiating a lower salary, sometimes by as much as $10,000, in exchange for an inflated job title.

I’ve read numerous studies illustrating how social media drives a lot of damaging behavior when it comes to spending habits.  I’ve even commented in a previous post on the perils of financial peer pressure.  It’s not entirely surprising to see this ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ mentality bleed into the world of professional identities.  It is astounding, however, to see job-title status prioritized over material levels of income.

Those articles further discuss that this motivation extends beyond just shaping how your social circle perceives you.  There is a belief that an elevated title could put you in a better position to climb the corporate ladder.  While there may be some truth to that; just like my signing bonus negotiation misstep, a $10,000 lower salary is a steep price to pay for so much uncertainty.

Ultimately, it’s probably misguided to negotiate a lower salary in exchange for bragging rights on a social media platform or the remote possibility of increasing your career trajectory.  Perhaps sharing my story will help a Millennial, or some other job seeker, avoid a salary negotiation blind spot of their own.