> But these days that doesn’t work because the market is oversaturated. Companies put up a job ad, and within minutes get 100 qualified applicants. They then reject 50% of them right off the bat, and then interview the rest, rejecting anyone who doesn’t completely ace every single interview question. When they’ve rejected 99% of applicants, they’ll offer a job to the last remaining candidate. In that scenario, the applicant has absolutely no leverage.<p>At first I was going to harp on whether the market was oversaturated or not, but there's an even bigger mistake -- as far as I can tell this situation <i>can increase</i> leverage for prospective employees who make it through the process. If you <i>know</i> that the company just spent 10/100s of hours reviewing, interviewing, and culling lots of applicants, but you made it through their obstacle course and they want to hire you, this means it's <i>very likely</i> a good fit -- that's rare. This would only be bad if the market happened to be saturated with <i>high quality</i> devs, but prices would drop.<p>This article seems like well-intentioned bad advice -- always negotiate. Analysis of perceived leverage is great, but in the end, if you get an offer you don't think is what your time is worth, then counter it. Politely but firmly ask for compensation in line with what you value your time at like "thanks so much for giving me a chance to join the team -- I'd love to accept the offer but I was really expecting<p>> The only programmers that have leverage these days are celebrity developers like Linus Torvalds and Guido Van Rossum.<p>???? This is just plain wrong -- if you are good at your job, you are going to produce a lot of value for a company depending on how they use you -- you don't have to be a celebrity developer to bring value to a company -- you could lack 100% of the technical or leadership skills of <i>either</i> of those people and simply by suggesting "why don't we just use google sheets" and save the company possibly 100s of thousands of dollars (in pricey subscription fees to data platform du jour).<p>IMO the real problem is information asymmetry -- companies have (obviously) way more information on what they're willing to pay, and not having any data points on what they're <i>willing</i> to pay makes it hard to search for the right companies (to begin with), and negotiate with advantage (at the end).<p>Sites like levels.fyi and early glassdoor did the most to help engineers reduce their disadvantage when negotiating -- if you want to get better at negotiating, get more information.