- \n
- How to negotiate (salaries and job titles)<\/a><\/li>\n
- Write more<\/a><\/li>\n
- You can pull levers you didn\u2019t know you could<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Money\n
- \n
- Your beliefs might be the main bottleneck<\/a><\/li>\n
- How to earn more<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Personal\n
- \n
- Having infinite money might change you for the worse<\/a><\/li>\n
- Burnout is hard to notice<\/a><\/li>\n
- Confidence comes from being at peace with yourself<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- What\u2019s next<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Career#<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How to negotiate (salaries and job titles)#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
At my first job, my relationship with money was one of avoidance. Sure, I wanted to earn more, but saying that to my manager out loud, or actively negotiating a raise somehow felt \u201csinful\u201d. Great engineers are motivated by challenges, not by money, right? You should focus on growth, and money and status will follow automatically, right??<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, I jumped into consulting and had to learn how to sell my services. After doing sales for a while, I\u2019m strongly convinced my earlier beliefs were anti-productive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You vs. company.<\/strong> It is<\/em> good to be motivated by challenges and focus on growth. But if you don\u2019t also actively negotiate for money, you\u2019ll lose out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reality is, your company does<\/em> negotiate. It\u2019s a business, so negotiating for better conditions \u2013 with suppliers, but also<\/em> with employees \u2013 is literally one of its primary activities. Your company is interested in paying you well to retain you (because hiring a new candidate is even more expensive), but if you never negotiate, they\u2019ll have no reason to pay you more than that. Not because they are bad, or hate you, or don\u2019t value you enough, but simply because they are capitalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, negotiating isn\u2019t sinful! Negotiating (salaries and titles) is one of the primary job responsibilities of your manager. They wouldn\u2019t think of you less if you push back on the offer and ask for more money \u2013 on the contrary, some people might actually respect you more! \u201cOh, he\u2019s got experience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Proof of value.<\/strong> To negotiate about salary and title, it helps to know what value you\u2019re bringing to the company. The way I approach this is by having a \u201cBrag Document\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/iamakulov.com\/notes2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Screenshot-2024-01-21-at-21.35.38-1024x785.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nEvery time I do something that results in a clear win, gets praised by somebody else, or exceeds my job responsibilities, I save a link or a screenshot of that into a Notion document. This helps both to build the portfolio (when you\u2019re self-employed), to write self-reviews during quarterly feedback (when you\u2019re employed), and to pick the best examples of your value when you\u2019re approaching your manager for negotiations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fear.<\/strong> Negotiations are, of course, very scary. What helps is knowing you have options \u2013 that is, if you request a new title or a higher salary, and the company says \u201cno\u201d, you can do something else apart from just accepting that \u201cno\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In self-employment, having options comes naturally. If you have a lot of incoming projects, you can freely experiment with prices and negotiate. If you don\u2019t have a lot of projects, and money isn\u2019t good, you can always go back to employment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In employment, this is harder. But know this: if your company has a good culture, failing at negotiations won\u2019t get you punished. If you ask your manager for a raise, and they refuse, they won\u2019t automatically fire you or think of you worse. Instead, a good manager will either<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- propose a way for you to reach what you\u2019re asking for (e.g., through a growth plan), or<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- tell you right away that you won\u2019t be able to reach that salary or title in the company.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
This means that as long as your company has a good culture, the worst outcome of salary negotiations would be \u201cnothing changes\u201d. Which isn\u2019t that bad! If you don\u2019t try to negotiate, nothing will change anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(See also \u201cMoney\u201d<\/a> below for more money-focused learnings.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Write more#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Writing is probably responsible for some of the best outcomes in my career. A webpack performance guide<\/a> landed me a contract with Google. My web performance blog<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Telegram channel<\/a> were responsible for 2\/3rds of the new clients I was getting when consulting. A Twitter thread with web performance tips got me invited to speak at the Smashing Conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In general, writing sets you apart from most other engineers. It shows your skills better than an interview. It attracts like-minded people, which increases your career opportunities. The only drawback about it \u2013 for me \u2013 is that it\u2019s annoyingly slow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t have great tips for writing, apart from \u201cjust try it\u201d (quality comes with practice) and \u201cdon\u2019t be afraid that you\u2019ll write badly and be judged\u201d (if one of your blog posts is bad, people will generally just ignore it instead of judging it) and \u201chave some basic form to convert people into subscribers\u201d (otherwise you fail to capture a lot of value from your writing). If you aren\u2019t sure what to write about, think of what you learned this week \u2013 and make a short blog post summarizing that. And finally, once you\u2019ve got a grip on writing, see \u201cMaking You Writing Work Harder For You\u201d<\/a> from, again, Patrick McKenzie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can pull levers you didn\u2019t know you could#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAgency\u201d<\/a> is hard to define, but I\u2019ll try. \u201cLow agency\u201d is when you mostly wait for other people to fix things. \u201cHigh agency\u201d is when you want something, and you pursue it yourself. Agency is a spectrum, and different people are at different points on that spectrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Being self-employed grows your agency a lot. Suddenly, you realize that a lot of things that you always perceived as an unchangeable norm are actually just a result of some human agreements. Which means you don\u2019t have to always follow them! This starts with a simple \u201cI can renegotiate working Mon-Fri\u201d and spreads to deeper \u201cthis process feels annoyingly broken, but I can just try and fix it?\u201d or \u201cif nobody in the company has ever tried shadowing the CEO<\/a> but I want to, I can just ask.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
See also: \u201cThings You\u2019re Allowed To Do.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Money#<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Your beliefs might be the main bottleneck#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
My income in 2017 (when I first started consulting) was $24,000\/year \u2013 a decent one for a new senior engineer in Belarus. By the end of my consulting experience, it reached a solid Bay Area engineer\u2019s level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every time it substantially increased, however, I was genuinely surprised: \u201cWait, people pay me that<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- \n
- In 2017, when I just started consulting, I set my initial hourly rate to $30 (double what I was making as an employee). A friend of mine tried to convince me to up it to $90\/hr instead. That didn\u2019t work out right away, but that allowed me to stabilize it at $60\/hr for a couple of years, earning 2\u00d7 more of what I was expecting to get initially.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- In 2021, whenever I\u2019d run a web performance audit, I\u2019d usually charge a client $5,000, budget a week for the audit, and then accidentally end up spending two instead. When I got fed up with regularly exceeding my own budgets, I bumped the audit price from $5,000 to $10,000. Surprisingly, that just worked. The customers kept happily paying twice more for the same audit<\/a> (it was still valuable for them!), and I doubled my income.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
My lessons from all those bumps that happened over the years were: there\u2019s easily more money to be earned than I think I could earn<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cI think\u201d bit is crucial. When you\u2019re a software engineer employed in Belarus, most people around you are also software engineers employed in Belarus. You might see your friends get paid $30,000\/yr or $50,000\/yr. You might see paths to reach that income. But nobody in your environment earns $200,000\/yr or $400,000\/yr, so it\u2019s very hard to tangibly feel \u201cwow, I can do the same\u201d \u2013 even though, in tech, you definitely can. Your own beliefs are your biggest roadblock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Screenshot](\"https:\/\/iamakulov.com\/notes2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Screenshot-2024-02-02-at-15.41.21-1024x981.png\")
Another data point for what\u2019s possible. Source<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n What helped me on my income path was bumping into people who were earning more than me \u2013 and asking them to help me with reaching their level. In 2017, it was my friend Gosha who pushed me to become self-employed. In 2021, it was a group of entrepreneurship-focused friends who convinced me to increase the audit prices. I\u2019m forever grateful to those folks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t want this section to end with \u201cwell just be lucky at bumping into the right people lol.\u201d Building good connections is hard, and I\u2019m still struggling with that, having moved to a new country two years ago. However, you can build these connections intentionally! (Spencer Fry has a great article on how to network better<\/a>.) And if you encounter me at some conference, I\u2019d be glad to try and help in the same way I was helped before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How to earn more#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Apart from realizing \u201cI can<\/em> earn more\u201d, it also helps to know how<\/em> to do that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My favorite income advice on the internet comes from Patrick McKenzie. If you\u2019re employed, here\u2019s his (extremely popular and well-written) article about salary negotiations<\/a>. If you\u2019re self-employed, here\u2019s another one with great advice<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And in my consulting life, what helped the most was switching from hourly to project-based pricing and investing in a portfolio of cases. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hourly \u2192 project pricing.<\/strong> Hourly pricing is easy to start with, but at some point, it turns from a benefit to a liability. It\u2019s hard to scale: not only because to earn more, you need to put in more hours, but also because hourly pricing has anchoring<\/em>. No matter how great a consultant you are, you\u2019ll have a very challenging time invoicing a client $300\/hour. Most software engineers whom the client would usually encounter would charge the client $80-150\/hr. Even if you\u2019re an incredible engineer, you\u2019d have a very hard time convincing the client you\u2019re worth 2-4 times more than an average engineer does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The solution here is to not<\/em> charge per hour. Instead, switch to charging per project. \u201cProject\u201d is a unique deliverable, which means a client can\u2019t easily compare it to anything else, which means that instead of thinking \u201cwhy is that consultant charging me those insane rates\u201d, the client will be forced to think in terms of \u201cis this project valuable enough for me\u201d. And this gives you much more leeway! It\u2019s hard to invoice $300\/hour, but it\u2019s much easier to invoice $6,000 for a 20-hour project if that project helped the client to earn much more than $6,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dan Mall covers how to design project prices in his book<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Building a portfolio.<\/strong> Patrick McKenzie advocates for writing a case study<\/a> after every successful project. I\u2019m writing too slowly to do that<\/em>; but still, after every project, I\u2019d normally have a dialog that would go like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n
Me: \u201cHey, by the way, now that this project is over \u2013 could you let me know if you\u2019re satisfied, more than satisfied, almost satisfied, or not really satisfied with the results?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Client: \u201cHey \u2013 I\u2019m [satisfied \/ very satisfied]! X was amazing, and Y was great.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Me: \u201cOh thank you so much for the feedback! Would you mind if I quote what you said about X and Y for my portfolio?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
This would allow me both to collect feedback about what worked and didn\u2019t work well; and to repurpose that feedback for testimonials. Asking a client to write a testimonial for you is rarely successful \u2013 the client has like a thousand more important things to do before that. But taking their feedback, drafting a testimonial based on that, and getting an \u201cokay\u201d from them works much better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Personal#<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Having infinite money might change you for the worse#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In 2021, I had \u201cinfinite\u201d money. I lived in Belarus, where the median salary is $600\/mo, I was earning a Bay Area-level income, and I was paying a 3% tax on that income. I spent a lot, but I was still earning faster than I could spend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was a conflicting experience. During that year, I felt rich and confident. I tried luxuries \u2013 chic hotels, fancy jewelry \u2013 that I thought I\u2019d never be able to experience. Unfortunately, my feeling of self-importance also grew, and I got snobbier. I started feeling that I\u2019m better than others, which was noticeable, especially to my friends and family. I ignored their feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of these changes, luckily, got reverted when I moved from Belarus to the Netherlands, and my income and taxes got much more aligned with what other people were earning. It took me a few months to notice and undo the personality changes, and another year to get rid of most overly expensive habits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m still trying to figure out what lessons to take from this experience, however.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My biggest learning so far, I think, is that I can\u2019t always trust my gut to guide me. \u201cDo I feel right about this?\u201d is one of the primary decision-making approaches I use, alongside the regret minimization framework<\/a>. The challenge is that during that year, my gut didn\u2019t feel wrong at all! Neither when I was choosing to act pretentious nor when my friends were telling me I\u2019d changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My second biggest learning is that there isn\u2019t that much value in being rich. It\u2019s nice, of course, and if I ever get rich again, I\u2019d probably enjoy it. But I feel I understand both the gains (feelings of prestige, access to nice luxuries, life that\u2019s easier in some aspects) and the costs (more work, fewer people who I can be vulnerable with, perhaps similar personality changes again) much better now. And at this point, I\u2019m not feeling like paying them again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Burnout is hard to notice#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In 2023, I was actively burning out. I was getting bored with repetitive projects; I was pushing myself to earn more, but to no avail; and I was struggling to make my consulting schedule work with other obligations I had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This, luckily, was resolved when I joined Framer; I\u2019m in a much better place now. But what that experience taught me is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you\u2019ve been feeling bad for a while (burning out, depressed, or similar), you mostly forget how you felt before. You tell yourself, \u201cWell, I\u2019m feeling a little meh about my work, but I guess it\u2019s always been like this.\u201d You tell yourself, \u201cA lot of people feel meh about their work, it\u2019s normal and expected.\u201d And you don\u2019t act on this \u201cmeh\u201d feeling in any way. This is a trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What you actually need to do if you\u2019re feeling \u201cmeh\u201d is to look back. Have you been feeling this \u201cmeh\u201d for more than six months? Something is definitely off, this isn\u2019t how most people feel at the baseline. Have you been trying to fix that \u201cmeh\u201d for a while? Your approach to fixing that obviously isn\u2019t working. Try something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What helped me was raising these feelings of \u201cmeh\u201d with an experienced manager friend of mine \u2013 and, through conversations with her, realizing that I might\u2019ve outgrown the goals I had. Once that happened, it became clear what I needed to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Confidence comes from being at peace with yourself#<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
For the past three years, whenever I\u2019d see any consulting agency site with a heading like this, I\u2019d shrink inside:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/iamakulov.com\/notes2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Screenshot-2024-02-03-at-00.45.08-1024x336.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nYou could never<\/em> make me write a paragraph starting with \u201cHere\u2019s why PerfPerfPerf [Ivan\u2019s consulting agency] is the best.\u201d Not because my work wasn\u2019t good \u2013 I was regularly delivering 2-4\u00d7 React performance improvements for my clients \u2013 but because the thought of writing this would instantly drown me in anxiety. Am I actually the best consultant? Don\u2019t I suck at X, Y, Z?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a confidence issue. Surprisingly, what I learned about confidence, from my experience and from that of others<\/a>, is that previous achievements barely help with it. You can rely on them to feel more confident, but no matter how many successes you had, a single failure is often enough to bring the anxiety back in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It turns out that what actually helps with confidence is being at peace with yourself, aligning your outer self (how you act and present yourself to others) with your inner self (how you actually feel on the inside). I\u2019m not sure why that works. But what I found is when I\u2019m kinder to myself, when I allow myself to be my genuine self \u2013 I feel calmer, more relaxed, and more confident, both in who I am and the decisions I make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, how do you get at peace with yourself? Some people get a lot of help from meditation. Some benefit from mentorship. Some do therapy and take drugs. For me, what seems to help the most is being in a secure, trusting relationship where I feel loved and genuinely accepted for who I am. This is still a bit of a crutch \u2013 when I rely on relationships to feel accepted, I\u2019m borrowing that acceptance from the outside instead of actually producing it inside. But as time goes on, I\u2019m getting better and better at the latter as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s next#<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
- Burnout is hard to notice<\/a><\/li>\n
- How to earn more<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Write more<\/a><\/li>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/iamakulov.com\/notes2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/Screenshot-2024-02-03-at-00.27.12-1024x585.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n