March 26th #CodersTeach chat roundup: Salary negotiation!

#codersteach #twitter #beginners

Hey everyone! Your favorite dev community ray of sunshine here! ☀️😊 I hope you're all having a fantastic week, learning and growing in ways you never imagined. If not—it's never too late to change things up!

So, I'm trying a new thing on here. I've been hosting the #CodersTeach Twitter chat for... hm... 26 weeks! (On March 26th, ha!)

#CodersTeach chats happen weekly on Tuesday nights at 8 PM EST, under the #CodersTeach hashtag!

Saron really inspired me to use my platform and steadily-increasing visibility to help others learn from each other. #CodeNewbie chats have been such an integral part of my developer growth AND community inclusion. I've met people through #CodeNewbie that have made me a better person—people who inspire me to make this industry the best it can be. ❤️

In #CodersTeach, we talk about all kinds of stuff, and we have a blast! Some of the topics so far have been:

Lifelong learning
Problem solving
Learning resources, including e-Learning platforms, books, podcasts, and videos
Learning skills and hacks
Kids and coding
Conference talks
Self-discipline
Code, of course, but language-agnostic... just conceptual! :)

So, I'm going to start doing a quick recap of what we talked about, to share participants' responses with the community. Hopefully, it provides some valuable insight into these super important topics, so enjoy and engage in the comments if you have thoughts!

This week's topic was salary negotiation.

This is such an important topic we need to be addressing as early on as possible, because there were a lot of common themes of low sense of self-worth.

It really reminded me of why I dedicated a whole week to career-based topics like this in my online course + career change coaching program for self-taught coders, 30 Days to Web Development. This shit is big. We literally leave money on the table unless we know what we're worth, and how to communicate it.

Q1.1: Have you ever negotiated a salary?

We started out with a quick poll, with some interesting results!

Out of 23 respondents,57% said they HAD negotiated a salary, and 43% said they had never negotiated a salary before.

Q1.2: What comes to mind when you think about the process of salary negotiation?

I think I have a very unique outlook on the salary negotiation process. We're just usually too nervous or uncomfortable, or lacking confidence:

Lauren went right in 🤣🤣:

But then made a really valid point:

Some of our other responses:

As one of the highlights of the night, our resident Rabbi on Rails, Yechiel dropped some experience and knowledge bombs on us in this amazing thread 💣💣 Go read!

Q2: Let's play pretend!

In this question, I challenged y'all to put on your imagination caps.

You're a hiring manager. You really like a candidate, and make them an offer to join your company.

They ask to think on it, then come back with a counter-offer that's significantly higher than the initial. What do you do?

Q3: If you could ask a salary negotiation expert ANYTHING, what would it be?

"No stupid questions" time! Well, it's always that time, because there are no stupid questions. They don't exist.

So, this part is particularly important. Real devs have questions, and I'd love to hear responses from some folks in the community with salary negotiation experience!

Here's what our folks are wondering, starting with me:

I was leaning toward "definite red flags, run away!", which seemed to be confirmed by others:

Sarah would like some tips on negotiating salary as an introvert. This sounds like a great La Vie en Code podcast episode! 🤩

Shout outs!

Here's what's going on with our #CodersTeach fam:

Yechiel is doing his first Meetup talk! 🕺🏾

I'm doing a giveaway for 30 Days to Web Development, my online course + career change coaching program for self-taught coders! It ends on March 31st at 11:45 PM EST, so be sure to enter!

Andy has a tutorial for IndexedDB in the works!

Lauren wrote about her first hackathon!

Jacob shared a dope new podcast called 2ndCareerDevs, hosted by software engineer Kyle Shevlin!

Dave is building an API!

John is killing it!

And Jerami wrapped it all up with some BIG LOVE! 💕