If your employer treats you more poorly because you negotiate a better comp package, you shouldn't be working for them; they are a bad employer.

If negotiation costs you a "once in a lifetime" opportunity, the opportunity is "once in a lifetime" in the "boiler room pump and dump" sense, or the "late night infomercial" sense. A year of your life, however, is priceless.

Your previous comment was only four sentences, one of which was an exhortation to read the previous sentence twice! I'm sure your implication wasn't intentional, but I find the suggestion that you aren't speaking simply enough for me to understand your reasoning offensive.

It's not that your explanation was too complex. I just don't agree with it.

It's rational to demand more from someone who you pay more. If one employee of a certain job-title asks more money than his/her colleagues who have equivalent skills, then expecting that person to handle more work or less desirable work that comes to the team is rational. It may not be optimal in every case, but it certainly doesn't make the manager's entire company "a bad employer".

There are many good opportunities in life that can come from not being maximally greedy. Some are once in a life time, some are more commonplace. One need only read biographies to find examples.

If, for your $5,000 pay bump†, the company decides they'd like you to be closing 35% more bugs than every other employer in your pay band, they can demand that in the negotiation. You can then make a decision about whether or not the bump is worth the concession. If it isn't, you can decline the job, or you can negotiate the concession, or you can decide to accept the previous offer.

It is (word chosen carefully:) alarming how bad engineers are at negotiation. Beliefs like yours (aggressive negotiation entitles an employer to maltreat employees later on down the line) are alarmingly common. They're simply not true.

The detail-shackled brains of nerds†† seem unable to get past something here: no matter what employers say the feel about negotiations, surely they can register the tenor of the negotiation in the back of their heads, and then ratchet their expectations appropriately. Surely, nerd engineers think, that must occasionally happen. Answer: yes, it does happen. AT BAD EMPLOYERS. Good employers understand how salary negotiations work and allow for it. The best employers even account for how bad engineers are at negotiations and go out of their way to help educate candidates (Fog Creek, for instance, once said they often "top up" the best offers some candidates receive --- that should function as a big red flashing light to those people that they didn't negotiate well enough).

I am not telling you that employers won't do irrational things if you negotiate hard with them. I'm telling you that if they do, you should run run run away fast, because that's the canary in the coalmine. Those employers are also going to dilute the shit out of you, call you in to work on weekdays, swap your tolerable manager out with some douchebag they hire from a BigCo to increase productivity, lock you into a regimented COLA-based incentive comp plan, slash your health care benefits 8 months down the road, and never ever improve the hardware you're issued.

Don't believe me? Think of it this way: the best engineers are disproportionately likely to negotiate aggressively. Employers that get vindictive about negotiation don't get to hire those people. Why are you interested in working at an employer that shuns the best talent?

(Hiring manager, one of many at my company, speaking here.)

There. You got a prolix response from me. Happy? :)

† (about which Patrick is right: its a rounding error, and it's the kind of rounding error that --- unlike, say, a better- but- out- of- spec laptop, which might incur a huge companywide "new laptops for everyone" shitstorm --- is particularly easy to concede to a new hire.)

†† (see my about:)

The go-to person for the hardest problems (who you generally want to be) is usually not chosen by the person who controls you comp, but in either case it's reflective of your title, not your salary, right?

Some errors in my previous comments:

I meant "call you in on weekends", not "weekdays", and I meant "at your performance review", not "at your employment review".

I really can't speak for engineers, since my experience as an employer wasn't at a tech company. I've been an owner of a painting business and a school. In my experience, I the correlation with the aggressive negotiating and job dedication skewed the other way from yours. In a pinch, particularly at the school, a forceful negotiator could extract higher pay (aka a raise) from me, but afterwards I had very little compunctions with pushing right back or firing if necessary. Less you think I was a terrible employer, I did pay employees between 30% and 80% over the market norms. It's just that employee loyalty is particularly important in that market (children's education), and creating an environment in which negotiation is the norm would have been creating a drain on both time and morale.

Now that I'm entering the tech industry, I suppose it could be an entirely different world. There is a limit to what I'll put up with, but for now my focus is on creating value, not extracting it. That said, I'll definitely keep your comments in the back of my mind next time I have a good opportunity to discuss pay.

I doubt it can be a once in a lifetime type of company if they would not hire you over a requested 4½% pay increase. If they play hardball over the requested raise, then you should accept the $110k offer.