u/Beautiful_Club_8309

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..............

I had a great interview a few days ago, and in the final minutes I strongly felt that they were going to make me an offer. So when they asked me what my current total compensation was, I inflated it a lot and told them I was making more than I am.

They came back with 38% above the number I had "inflated," which comes out to about a 76% increase over my real full package.

Was that the honest thing to do? No.

Do I feel guilty? Also no.

I'm not saying everyone should try doing this, because it could go very badly. But in my case, it worked out better than I expected, and I hope it works out for you too if you've ever been in that situation.

Salary questions can be one of the hardest moments in any interview, especially when you want to negotiate without undervaluing yourself. Having a prepared plan for how to answer can change the whole direction of the conversation.

I came across a post with job interview tips that might be useful if you're preparing for a situation like this. Honestly, salary expectations always make me feel like they're the part where one wrong sentence could cost you a lot, so it was useful to see several clear ways to phrase the answer.

I work at a small, family-owned manufacturing company that makes good money. They brought us into a meeting on Wednesday and told us that, effective immediately, we were all being let go because the business had been sold to an investment group. Apparently the old owners did it as an "asset buy," which means the employees were treated like extra baggage they didn't want on the books. They told us we could "reapply" for the exact same jobs under the new management, but some salaries and benefits had been reduced due to restructuring. They also changed the job descriptions and added more duties to them.

Everyone was shocked. No one had even heard any rumors that this was happening, but so far not a single person has submitted an application for their old position. Unemployment is very low around us, and a lot of places are hiring. The new owners brought in a manager who set up a little application station next to the front office, and put out muffins and coffee. She's sitting there, and no one has touched them or the forms.

The average employee here has been here 16 years, and a lot of people have been here more than 22 years, so many decided to just retire. The funny part, if you can call it that, is that we make a specialty product on machines that our own shop built, repaired, and kept running for years. All that know-how walked out at once. Moving production or handing it off somewhere else isn't realistic. Even the people who handled sales and accounting are leaving. I'm going to give more time to my side business because it's starting to grow, and honestly I'd also rather have more time with my family. The schadenfreude here is extremely high, toward both the old owners and the new ones. Good luck running the place without the people who know how it works.

This is a good reminder that job security can vanish overnight. You might think you have plenty of time to prepare for your next opportunity, only to suddenly find yourself sitting in another job interview. That's why I believe that preparing beforehand is extremely important, and I think I was preparing for interviews incorrectly until I read this post which offers some tips to avoid wrong preparing for interviews. I think it might be very helpful.

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Exactly

For most of my husband's career in tech, I honestly thought he was practically immune to any recession. For nearly 18 years, he had a very specific, oddly niche technical specialty, and companies were chasing after him hard. On top of that, he has an MBA, strong presentation skills, and a strange natural talent for selling himself and the ideas he's working on. I can't remember how many times I watched him calmly say he was open to something new, and then within a week or so, serious, high-paying offers would appear. Very often, recruiters or companies would contact him when he wasn't even looking.

Then the wave of tech layoffs hit last fall. Like so many people, he was laid off in one of the big rounds. At first, we weren't too alarmed, because this is someone who had never really had to fight hard to get hired before.

Now we're coming up on around seven months, and I'm sitting here in our home in the Bay Area with a constant uneasy feeling I can't shake. He has applied to more jobs during this period than he probably applied to in the rest of his entire career combined. We've tried almost every angle we can think of:

Remote jobs? He applied. On-site roles in other states? He applied. Hybrid roles? He applied. Positions one or two levels below where he was before? He applied. Jobs that pay massively less than his previous compensation? He applied.

He has rewritten and polished his resume more than once. He started tailoring cover letters instead of just sending generic ones. He spends a lot of time writing genuinely thoughtful notes to hiring managers, reaching out to former coworkers, asking for referrals, following up, cold-contacting people, fixing up LinkedIn, everything.

After more than 130 applications, the result has been five initial HR calls that went nowhere. A few of them honestly felt like ghost jobs, as if the company had no real plan to fill the role but needed to look like it was hiring.

We have savings, and I'm grateful for that, but the panic has started to feel like more than just a theoretical idea. The part that's hard for me to understand is that his seniority and deep experience seem to be hurting him now. I feel like companies look at his background and assume he'll be too expensive, or too senior, or unhappy stepping into a smaller role, even though he is very clearly flexible on title and pay.

This market feels harsher than anything I've personally seen, and I graduated right into the mess after 2009, so that's not saying nothing. I'm looking for any advice, unusual tactics, or perspective from people who have been through this with a senior tech spouse or partner. What helped? Was there anything that finally broke the pattern?

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.....

As soon as I finally got out of the Teams call, I screamed into a blanket.

UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH

I can usually speak well and come up with reasonable and "professional" answers to interview questions without my brain completely shutting down... But apparently not talking to normal human beings for weeks made my social skills turn into LITERAL DUST, because everything I said came out awkward and unclear/I was desperately searching for words/and full of "UMMMM...uhhh...I mean like...yeah..."

And then... After I managed to pull it together soooooomewhat and thanked the interviewer for meeting with me in a way that was only maybe 80% humiliating, I accidentally left the *side room*, instead of leaving the call itself, and suddenly appeared in the main room where the other interviewers were very clearly doing a private debrief among themselves...

Brilliant.

Totally normal:):):)

I'm going to melt into the carpet in a corner now "haha" "xD" "lol"