this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Every recruiter that has called me over the last three years when I tell them my salary requirements, they ask me if I'm serious, and they tell me that there's no job in the world that would pay me that amount of money, and I'm like, I'm already working a job that pays me that amount of money within a few percentage points.
Why should I take a pay cut to come work for you? And they never have an answer.
More explicitly, I'm making mid-six figures, and they'll call me up and offer me a job that pays like $60,000 a year, and I say, sorry, if you want me to come work for you, I'm gonna need mid-six figures, plus a little bit extra to make it worth my while, and they realize they have called the wrong person.
And it's always some dipshit recruiter who is trying to hire me for a starter position in the field that I have 14 years of experience in.
There’s a lot of offshore recruiters trying to make a win by spamming for every opportunity that opens.
My number for them for in person office work is 3-4x current gross. It hasn’t worked out for me yet but maybe one day!
I guess I'm overcharging at 6x....nah.
For me, it's just a slightly more polite way to tell them where they can put their in-office requirement.
When you say mid-six figures do you mean ~$150k or ~$500k?
Last year, it was in the 200s, so I guess low-mid six figures is more accurate.
What profession are you in? I feel like I got into the wrong one.
MSP tech consultant for law firms, working on becoming an IT director or CTO though.
I do things from basic tech support all the way up to rolling out and deploying firm wide software.
I would say that I'm pretty good about not only dealing with new issues when they pop up, but also with establishing practices that can be repeated by other people, diarizing and cataloging the common issues that the companies I work for encounter, and minimizing the mental overhead of technology so they can get to the work of doing their business of protecting or attacking on behalf of their clients.
And that sounds like jargon tech-speak shit, but I do everything in my power to back it up with action and with logs that other people can read and follow, even if they're not especially technical.
I started working for a mom-and-pop IT shop when I was in my early 20s, got my A+, started working for hospitals, and just ended up winding my way through the entire IT field. And the annoying thing is, is my whole life I wanted to be an engineer, lol, but I took IT jobs because I had bills to pay and I was good at it, so I just stayed with it.
I've found that a lot of recruiters who reach out are offering really mediocre jobs, and probably have one themselves. I had a recruiter email, text and call me within 2 hours for a role he had, which would be paid about half of what I'd been making when I was recently unemployed. Starting at 8:30am my time. When he told me what the role paid, I basically told him I'm not desperate, but he clearly is.
I think I've had one recruiter reach out in the last year about a role that isn't at least a 30% pay cut, and that was one with a step up in responsibilities, with a small pay cut.
At first I was offended that they were even bothering to reach out for super entry level roles, when I'm clearly not at that level, but I think they're just spraying and praying, and probably paid mainly based on how many people they get into jobs.
To be fair, the reason they expect 60k to be reasonable is that 500k is absolutely not.
In this context, I think “mid- six figures” means about 150k.
I did clarify later but I came in just a hair under a quarter mil last year. Taking one of these jobs would be a 75%+ pay cut.
Can you explain how that is fair in your opinion? Why do you think I should not be paid $500k for my work when you don't even know what I do?
I mean, these kinds of recruitment offers are like offering Warren Buffett a job as the assistant general manager of a rural dollar general.
I'm sure he would be very good at the task, but you can't afford him.
Because I don't think anyone should be paid $500k for work. It's too far from the median. There's nothing more to it than that, really.
So what you're saying is that if I, as a semi-independent contractor, should generate millions of dollars of profit for a company that I shouldn't get a reasonable percentage of that, but that I should just be glad that I was given the opportunity to work?
Or are you saying that when my initiatives, come up with by me, presented to the customer, approved, signed off on, and then followed through with and delivered, that generates new opportunities for millions of dollars a year of revenue growth for both the company I contract with and the company I've contracted for, that I should not be paid commensurately to the value that I provided, but rather, I should count myself lucky that I have a job at all?
I don't know, man, that's pretty anti-worker of you. I don't think we could be friends if that's how you think.
I think the profits of the company should be disconnected from the profits of the employee unless it's explicitly a cooperative. However, and this is important I think, I think that companies shouldn't generate millions of dollars of untethered profit in the first place.
Well, I understand that you may think that, but the fact is that it's happening.
So would you rather the corporations generate millions of dollars worth of untethered profit and not pay the workers that made that money for them, or would you rather them generate millions of dollars of untethered profits and pay the workers that generated the money for them?
Not trying to be facetious, but that's a bit like saying, "people are dying in car accidents so would you rather the cars come with heated seats or cigarette lighters?" It doesn't matter what is or isn't happening, it's not connected to anything else in this thread.
I think you're wrong if you're not being facetious then, because people are going to drive cars as long as cars are available, and there's nothing quibbling about it can do about that.
So would you rather that employers pay a significant and fair portion of the profits to the people that generated them or would you rather that employees be grateful that they have a job at all because they're going to make that money and the question is do the workers that generate the money deserve a fair share of it?
If I make my boss $10 million, am I not entitled to $500,000 of that?