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I recently finished reading the book Never Split the Difference and I would highly recommend it. It's a slightly different take on the traditional negotiation tropes we've all heard.
I've managed to employ many of the techniques in my day to day as a PM with success, but his discussions on salary negotiation resonated with me. I'm sure you can find some notes on the book to derive 50% of the value, but the author's stories and explanations drove it home for me.
I recently finished Never Split The Difference too. It was a good read and provides a different perspective on the whole negotiation process. I couldn't help but think however, that the various techniques outlined in the book were nothing more than parlor tricks. Seems like the more these techniques are known, the less useful they become.
Am I wrong? Now that I know how it 'works' I can pick out Ackerman bargaining tactics from a mile away so it's basically a moving target. I feel truly great negotiating tactics are an artform. To succeed you need creativity and flair that can't be duplicated mechanically.
I can't speak for negotiating in general, but I had some experience in leadership courses. This was in the context of an outdoor club in university, and they taught us techniques on how to make new people feel welcomed. Even among the group who were all given the same instruction, the techniques were still effective! I wouldn't discount it entirely just because the other party is also aware of the same information.
Its more about the emotional effort and control than the techniques themselves, else everyone could easily be a master salesperson.
Just because you can pick out the tactics doesn't mean you can't be worn down, or still end up trusting a person. Some folks emotionally mirror so much that they just don't end up having control in the situation.
I've read that book and others. NSTD is both extremely good and extremely bad.
TLDR: It's a great book if you can ignore his attitude. And ignore every negative thing he says about Ivy MBA programs and their books. He is simply wrong about them.
The good:
The methods advocated in the book are somewhat "simple" to remember. This is because he focuses on what will work 70-80% of the time, whereas other books tend to also target the remaining scenarios, creating bloat and complex methods.
This is probably the best book when it comes to the psychological aspect of negotiation. The other books do have it, but tend to focus more on the rational aspects.
The bad:
Writing style can be very offputting. An incredible amount of boasting. A lot of it is justified, given he was one of the FBI's top negotiators. But he goes well beyond it. He starts the book describing how he walked into a Harvard class on negotiating and completely dominated the other students with his negotiation prowess. And he goes on and on about how he beat the Harvard students. Really? In my warped view of the world, I thought it was a given that a Harvard student new to negotiations should be able to beat the FBI's top negotiator.
This was beyond pathetic. It's as if Roger Federer wrote a book boasting about how we visited a tennis academy and managed to trounce everyone. What an achievement!
The anti-academic bashing is strong, and quite unjustified. Throughout the book he boasts that his techniques are way better in the real world than what the academics/Ivy schools teach. Umm... no. I read the Ivy school's books before reading this one, and roughly 70-80% of the techniques in NSTD are the same as the ones taught in MBA programs.
I've noted many parts of NSTD where he makes a false claim against the Ivy Books, or where he claims the Ivy Books don't teach Y. One day I intend to write a detailed review on a blog somewhere listing all his claims, and next to each one quoting one of the Ivy Books refuting his claims. It's just very dishonest of the author to criticize other books this way.
(And no, I don't think any of the Ivy Books actually suggest splitting the difference as a good strategy - I recall one even saying it is an option, but mostly if nothing else is working and your BATNA is not good).
Finally, some good books talk about different negotiation strategies based on your relationship with the person. When you don't care about the other person (e.g. haggling in a marketplace), the strategy you would use differs very much from one where you value the relationship (e.g. business partner). He doesn't really distinguish, and it's not surprising given his background where most of his professional negotiations were one-off.
Please be careful when using his tactics with people you want to maintain good relations with. They work well the first few times, but some of them really start to annoy people. One of my managers left our team and was replaced by another one (new to managing). The new manager used some of these techniques, although she had not read the book (especially the continual "How can I do that?" questions). She was relatively successful in the negotiations, but it damaged a lot of relationships. 3 people eventually moved to other teams.
If one is looking for additional books to read, I recommend:
- Bargaining For Advantage (not very prescriptive, but this is the best one to make someone interested in negotiations and want to learn more).
- Getting Past No. You probably should read Getting To Yes before reading it, though. GPN has some overlap with NSTD regarding the psychological side of negotiating.
Getting To Yes is often recommended. It's decent. My only caveat is that it is not as broad as BfA, and because it gets recommended all the time, a lot of people feel GTY is "sufficient". When it fails for them, they abandon the whole discipline thinking they're just not cut out for it.
Not specific to negotiations, but I recommend as well:
- Influence. Many books (including NSTD) invoke this book.
- A good book on communications (e.g. Nonviolent Communications or Crucial Conversations).
A lot of negotiation techniques are derived from these two topics, and they'll make a lot more sense if you've read them.
Finally, regarding salary negotiations, there's actually a really good one in the book, which is the flip of what is usually taught. The conventional wisdom is that if you can't get your desired salary, negotiate on other things (work environment, work from home, hours, vacations, perks). He flipped it around. If it seems they won't match your salary, keep asking for benefits/perks that are somewhat reasonable, but you're confident they can't provide them. The company will usually say "Sorry, we can't provide that perk, would a $x increase in salary do?"
I haven't tried it, but I can see it would work - most large companies have a limited set of variables they can tweak, and cannot customize much for a single employee. So they compensate by increasing the offer.
Interesting that their suggestion "People often get tired of hearing their own name. Switch tracks and use your name instead." is at odds a bit with Dale Carnegie's "Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language."
While I still think Carnegie's book is a must read, I feel like it can be summed up by: "empathy, have some."
But his ethos is applied and over applied so much that some times it's a breath of fresh air when a sales person just cut to the chase. Especially in this day and age in most cases, the user probably have had a couple weeks to try and thoroughly read the manual on your product. The sales calls are basically a formality. Beating around the push just wastes everyone's time. Just my 2c.
They have a great team and they're making a big push to bring PSD2 compliant banking integrations to Europe. I haven't heard of many other offerings within Europe.
This is tangentially related to something I've been struggling with for the last year. I began getting into photography about a year and as an attempt to surround myself with inspiration, I followed many of the top landscape photographers on Instagram. While their images are beautiful and they tend to position their photographs from the perspective of "environmentalism", I can't help but feel like they've done as much damage as anything else.
Two examples come to mind. Last year, the USFS extended the lottery permit season in the Enchantments by six weeks due to increasing popularity, no doubt fueled by the incredible pictures of it littered across Instagram. Iceland is a top destination for photographers (for good reason) and I traveled there two months ago, no doubt influenced by the pictures I've seen. But it felt like the country was beginning to get ruined by me and my fellow tourists.
It feels like we're beginning to lose the hidden gems as more and more photographers rush to be the first. But even the non-hidden gems are beginning to get exposed more and more often. But I see the same spots being visited by all photographers and I don't see how they'll handle the continued influx of people:
It's great that people are interested in seeing the world, but I'd say the set of people that love photographing amazing locations and preserving them is much smaller than the set of people that only care about the former. That said, I'm probably more of a contributor to this than I'd care to admit.
The key, as a photographer, is then to find the beauty elsewhere, preferably in the everyday.
I maintain an active mountain images account, but when I post from somewhere untouched, I'm deliberately vague as to the location.
I'm watching the same thing happen with a tarn on Mt. Rainier. People are figuring out its location, and soon it will be highly trafficked. Most of these places look untouched precisely because people have gone to some trouble not to touch them.
Some overuse is a worthy trade, if, when at the ballot box and the cash register, nature-aware humans make the deliberate choice to sacrifice in order to preserve that which remains.
I've had this exact discussion with my friends a several times recently. We regularly go hiking and backpacking in the mountains of upstate NY and New England, and have independently noticed the trend of people 'peak bagging' instagram hotspots over the past couple of years.
It's tough because I'm a big fan of getting people outside, and this renewed interest in visiting national parks could in theory drive more funding and interest in wildlands preservation, but in the meantime has drawn hordes of people who don't always respect the place they're visiting.
There are microcosms of the instagram top spots phenomenon you've listed all over the place as well. This past summer I went to visit a backcountry waterfall in my hometown where locals used to cool off, and could not believe how many people there were there, some clearly from far away, taking pictures of themselves in front of it. The instagram location tag for it has thousands of posts, for a place that is pretty but not really spectacular.
If you really like something, tell nobody. If you find beautiful waterfalls, don't tell anyone. A great fishing hole? Keep it to yourself. A great diner? Nary a soul should you tell.
I'm only slightly exaggerating.
In defiance of my above statement, I own this tree and it is my favorite tree. The forestry service cored it and it's at least 220 years old.
Living somewhere that's increasingly being overrun with disrespectful tourists, I've been making a point of keeping my travels a secret as well. I've found loads of beautiful spots and I take plenty of pictures, but those pictures are all for my own memories. I don't show them to anyone since I know I'd come back to a trashed location later. I recently went back to a small town that had almost zero tourism not long ago, only to find hordes of tourists and "X ︎LOVES Y" messages carved into walls and trees everywhere.
Oh! That's brilliant. I usually carry a cheap camera instead of my expensive DSLR and it doesn't geotag as it has no GPS. It's disabled on my cell phone - usually. It re-enabled itself (that's my excuse and I'm sticking with it) at one point, so I manually edited the exif data.
I'm not a hugely private person (I've had countless internet friends visit me over the years) but I'm not giving up coordinates to my favorite fishing hole. As near as I can tell, only three people know about it.
I really am partially serious about telling nobody. That's how things get ruined - from your favorite diner to your favorite hidden beach. Pretty soon your favorite diner is always full and there's trash on your once secluded beach.
I'm not entirely kidding around myself. A lot of the places where I enjoy taking photos, you'd need to be a Baltimore native or a long-time resident to find, and I have no desire to change that. But when it comes to photography, I'm more about making the most out of the everyday.
I mind me of a fellow who briefly set up, on the Fourth of July, directly alongside me on the north brow of Federal Hill - he unlimbered a pair of tripods, a sack full of lenses, and a setup based on a D7100 that cost more for just the body than I paid for my entire kit. Then, after five minutes, he tore everything down again and strode purposefully off, leaving behind only a vague complaint about how "the atmosphere was wrong". I'm not sure what he meant, and since those few words were the only ones he said to me throughout his time on the hill, I have no idea how his shots might compare to my own [1] [2]. No doubt they are much better, though.
Come to think about it, I haven't posted a new gallery since before the train wreck. I'll have to make some time this weekend and fix that!
Those are fantastic. I don't want to derail the thread by going too far off-topic, so email is uninvolved@outlook.com (if you're interested in showing more specific examples of your work or galleries).
Thanks so much! I wasn't totally displeased with them. At risk of further derailing - everything I have that's worth showing, I put up there, albeit sometimes very belatedly. Contact info's there, or in my profile here.
I believe there's a counteracting mechanism at work that compensates (and then some) for the possible damages from tourism.
Look at Yellowstone, or the country of Guatemala, where it's the interest by visitors that provides the necessary incentives to protect the natural beauty.
The same has (somewhat) worked to reduce the risk of extinction for many species of African mammals as well.
I began getting into photography as well, around the first of the year, and the trick to me seems to be finding what's amazing in the places where you are every day. I mean, if I had the spare time to travel to places where the landscape is already amazing, I suspect I would, too. But I think it might feel like easy mode to me, if I did.
I know Amazon gets a generally bad rap around HN, but my organization at least pays for all SDEs to attend one conference a year. While not everybody takes advantage of it, those that have typically provide several brown bag sessions to disseminate their learnings to the team.
I've found it very useful both to attend and to learn from those that attended, particularly when I can get the highlights (and potentially new ideas!) of a conference I'd never attend personally.
You do realize the way most services get into AWS is that they're first built in the retail side of Amazon (without any thought towards AWS) and then once people realize it's effectively solving an actual problem, it's rebuilt for AWS. Having to support Amazon retail is a pretty demanding stress test -- I'm not sure why you're getting this notion that Amazon doesn't run anything. I should think handling Black Friday alone would count for something..
That is something of a myth. AWS was created and evolves completely separately from retail, which didn't really use it in anger until 2010ish. Retail is effectively a large customer to AWS. They're very good at watching what customers are doing in general.
No one is saying amazon doesn't test their stuff. The argument here is that Google is inherently a more technical company, which is a fair comparison. Their products are more technical. Ad Sense, Gmail, YouTube are incredibly technical products due to their scale, and the argument here is that nothing of similar technicality exists in Amazon's core business, which I think is totally fair.
I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.
The concept of "us vs everyone else" or "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy" is probably the most clear difference in US TV shows when I compare it to where I live.
It always seems to be the exception rather than the rule, that people might be willing to co-operate. The idea of "only we are sane" is another. Assuming everyone else is crazy or disagreeable seems to be common.
I wonder if that is something reflected by US media correctly or if it is something skewed.
I've wondered the same thing. It concerns me that there are more police dramas than any other genre on American television.... and even more that they are so popular. It says alot about a cultural mindset. One the one hand you can argue the shows are being pushed.. but they wouldn't continue to do so if people didn't eat them up.
It's a gut fear that is being appealed to, and simultaneously teaching people exactly "us vs everyone else" and "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy." Even your neighbor. Even your friends.
Makes me sad.
It didn't used to be that way in the US. It's certainly gotten worse.
Bike theft is actually a surprisingly big thing in Japan. However, they have another method to control it: all bikes are registered and police conduct random spot checks of ID and registration. (Foreigners tend to get "randomly" checked more often.)
We're currently exploring what it means to support non-git VCSs natively in Sourcegraph, but we're not there yet.