negotiating-compensation

negotiating-compensation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. It costs 34 tokens per session (1,618 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for negotiating pay and other terms when applying for product or engineering jobs, including startup stock options.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps benchmark job levels, ask recruiters about budgets, discuss compensation, assess equity, and negotiate flexibility and other non-cash terms.
Why use it?
It helps candidates understand their market value, avoid naming a salary too early, and compare the full offer rather than salary alone.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps benchmark job levels, ask recruiters about budgets, discuss compensation, assess equity, and negotiate flexibility and other non-cash terms.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation
About the project

Lenny Skills is a collection of product-management and engineering workflows for Claude Code and other AI agents, covering areas such as strategy, research, planning, shipping, growth, and hiring. Each skill gives an agent specialized guidance, frameworks, checklists, or templates for product work, and the catalogue contains many of these skills.

RefoundAI/lenny-skills · 1,318 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill negotiating-compensation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for negotiating-compensation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for negotiating-compensation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/negotiating-compensation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,618 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00034 $0.01618
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00809
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00324
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00162

Measured 11d ago against content hash a692c3b39b3b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

negotiating-compensation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/negotiating-compensation/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Negotiating Tech Compensation

Master the art of benchmarking, intelligence gathering, and collaborative negotiation to maximize your total rewards.

Help the user with negotiating tech compensation using insights from 1 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Benchmark your value - Map your current and target roles to standardized job levels and percentile data to find your true market range.
  2. Gather interview intelligence - Use specific questions during the interview process to uncover team priorities and the company's internal budget bands.
  3. Deploy deflection scripts - Provide exact wording to avoid sharing salary expectations early and instead pivot the conversation to the company's budget.
  4. Evaluate the total package - Analyze equity components like an investor while maximizing non-financial levers like work-life flexibility.

Core Principles

Gather Intelligence Early

From "The 10 commandments of salary negotiation": "Every recruiter worth their salt will ask about your salary expectations when you first start interviewing. Do not — I repeat, do not — give them a number. What to do instead: Ask for the range they’re budgeted for the role."

Start the negotiation during initial interviews by asking for the budgeted salary band instead of providing your own expectations.

Match Strategy to Company Philosophy

From "How much product managers make in the U.S., Europe, and Canada": "At Tesla, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Google, and Netflix (the Magnificent 7), the starting base salary for a (non-APM) PM is $136,000, $156,000, $158,000, $158,000, $167,000, $199,000, and $343,000, respectively. Netflix and Tesla are low on equity, while Meta, Google, and Nvidia are quite high."

Identify if a company uses a high-cash model like Netflix or a high-equity model like Google to tailor your negotiation requests.

Leverage Level Jumps

From "How much product managers make in the U.S., Europe, and Canada": "The biggest salary jump happens going from L4 to L5 and M3 to M4. And then from VP to CPO."

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 97 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A a692c3b39b3b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

negotiating-compensation is a skill published in the GitHub repository RefoundAI/lenny-skills (1,318 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,618 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.