The news cycle this fall has been brutal. Meta laid off 11,000 people. Twitter cut 3,700 roles. Stripe, Amazon, and Salesforce announced significant reductions. If you work in technology, you’ve probably felt the weight of these announcements, either directly through layoffs at your own company or through the ambient anxiety of watching peers get the news. The instinct, when surrounded by that kind of economic uncertainty, is to keep your head down, stay quiet, and hope you’re not the next person called into a conference room.

That instinct is wrong. November and December are actually your best negotiating window of the entire year, and the layoffs, counterintuitively, make your position stronger, not weaker.

Why Now is Your Moment

Budget season happens once a year, and for most enterprises and mid-market companies, it’s happening right now. The final quarter is when finance teams and departmental leaders lock in spending plans for the next fiscal year. Salary adjustments, promotions, and compensation changes are approved or denied during this window. If you miss it, you’re waiting until next November to make another formal case for a raise.

That one-year wait matters because inflation doesn’t care about your company’s budget cycle. The Consumer Price Index hit 7.7% in October 2022, which means a 3% salary increase is actually a pay cut. You’re not getting ahead. You’re standing still while your purchasing power erodes. Anyone who tells you that a 3% raise is “market rate” this year is either not looking at inflation data or is hoping you won’t notice the gap.

The layoffs, strange as it sounds, strengthen your hand further. Companies that survived the cutting are keenly aware that they’ve lost institutional knowledge, project continuity, and sometimes critical technical depth. The people who remain have just become more valuable, not less. If you’ve been at your company for more than a couple of years, you know how the systems work, who does what, where the documentation lives, and how to get things done in your specific organizational context. That knowledge walks out the door when you do, and in a post-layoff environment, companies understand that replacing it is costly.

Start With Your Wins Log

Before you schedule a conversation with your manager, you need to know what you’ve actually delivered this year. This sounds obvious, but most people don’t keep a running record of their accomplishments, and when you’re asking for a raise during the holidays, you’ll lose if you rely on memory.

Starting now, if you haven’t already, write down everything significant you’ve shipped, solved, or improved in 2022. This isn’t a brag. It’s documentation. Include projects completed, problems resolved, systems you’ve improved, mentoring you’ve done, and especially any work that saved the company money or prevented problems from becoming crises.

Specificity matters here. “Improved performance” is not a wins log entry. “Reduced database query times by 40%, saving an estimated $50K annually in cloud infrastructure costs” is. “Led the migration to zero trust architecture, reducing breach surface area and ensuring compliance with new corporate security mandates” is the entry. “Helped junior team member get certified” becomes “Mentored two junior admins through their CompTIA and cloud certifications, both now independently managing client relationships previously requiring senior oversight.”

If you did any of this work while your team was simultaneously understaffed due to layoffs, note that separately. You’ve been asked to do more with less, and that’s worth mentioning.

Frame It Around Value, Not Entitlement

This is where the psychology matters. Your manager is not going to approve a raise because you’ve been at the company for a long time, or because you’re a nice person, or because you work hard. Your manager will approve a raise because you’ve delivered value that exceeds what your current salary reflects.

The conversation isn’t “I deserve a raise” or “I’ve been here through a lot this year.” Those frames are about what you’re owed, and they put your manager in a defensive position. Instead, frame it this way: “I want to talk about my compensation because the work I’ve delivered this year has significantly exceeded my current level, and I want to make sure my pay reflects the scope I’m actually working at.”

Then walk through your wins log. Talk about specific projects, their business impact, and how the work you did this year was different from what was in your job description when you were hired. Talk about how you’ve grown in the role. Talk about how you’ve picked up slack from the layoffs without letting quality slip. This is all factual, and it’s all about the value you’ve provided.

The manager’s job is to justify compensation to finance and to the executive team. If you give your manager a good business case, you’ve made their job easier. You’re not asking for a favor. You’re asking them to recognize reality.

When Salary Isn’t the Only Option

Not every company has the flexibility to give significant raises right now, even the ones that are currently profitable. Some have already decided that salary increases are off the table for everyone until Q2 2023. That doesn’t mean you have nothing to negotiate.

Start by asking what’s possible in salary. If the answer is genuinely “nothing,” then shift to other compensation forms. Remote work flexibility, additional paid time off, a formal commitment to flexible hours, a training or certification budget, a title change that reflects your actual responsibilities, professional development funding, conference attendance, or a path to a promotion in 2023 with clear milestones: these all have real value and cost the company either less money or less immediately.

A title change to reflect what you’re actually doing is particularly valuable because it carries forward on your resume for your next role. A training budget lets you build skills that increase your market value. Remote work flexibility improves your quality of life and, if you use it strategically, can mean the difference between staying at a company and looking elsewhere. These aren’t consolation prizes if you’re worth more; they’re alternatives when the cash simply isn’t there.

If you push on salary and get a genuine “no,” don’t just accept it. Ask what would need to change for salary to be on the table in 2023. Is it company revenue? Is it your role expanding? Is it a performance metric? Get specificity. Then ask for whatever else is negotiable to show that the company values you enough to make a real offer, even if it isn’t purely cash.

Handling the “No” Without Resigning in Anger

If your manager or HR comes back with a flat “no” to everything, and I mean truly everything, that’s information. It tells you that either the company is in worse financial shape than they’ve admitted, or they don’t see your value the way you do. Either way, you have a decision to make.

One outcome is that you accept the no but document the conversation and set a date in your calendar for February to revisit. “I understand that now isn’t the right time, but I’d like to revisit this in Q1” is a reasonable request, and it keeps the conversation open. Companies sometimes have more flexibility after the holidays or after they see how the fiscal year is tracking.

The other outcome is that you start looking. Not in anger, but systematically. Use what you learned in your wins documentation: you delivered significant value this year, you’ve grown your skills, and you know your market value. If you want to revisit our earlier point here, we’ve got a full guide to salary benchmarking in a hyper-competitive market, which will help you know your actual worth before you start talking to other companies. External market pressure is sometimes the only thing that changes compensation at your current employer, and sometimes external opportunities are simply better.

One other path exists, though, and it gets overlooked in these conversations: internal moves. If your company won’t pay for your current role, sometimes a lateral move to a different department, or a promotion into an adjacent role, opens up the budget for the compensation you want. There’s a much longer discussion about career advancement without job-hopping and how to negotiate internal moves, but the short version is that moving from “no” to “not right now” sometimes means you need to move up or sideways first, then circle back to compensation.

The Layoff Psychology: You’re Thinking About This Wrong

Here’s the thing that most people won’t tell you directly: the best time to negotiate is often when it feels like the worst time. When layoffs are happening, when companies are cutting, when the headlines are scary, your brain is telling you to be grateful you still have a job and to keep quiet. That instinct is there because for decades, that’s how employment worked. You were lucky to have work. You didn’t push back on compensation. You kept your head down.

The world has shifted. The IT job market, even post-layoff, is still competitive. The companies doing the cutting are doing so because they over-hired, not because there’s suddenly no demand for skilled people. If anything, the companies that survived the cuts are acutely aware of how much they depend on the experienced people they have left. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door is a real cost.

So when the anxiety hits and you think “this is the worst time to ask,” remember: your company is still budgeting for next year. They’re still making decisions about headcount and salary. If you don’t ask during budget season, you’re waiting for next November. If you ask during a layoff, you’re leaning into the company’s awareness that losing you would be expensive. Both matter, and both are true.

Make the Case Before December

The simple timeline: schedule the conversation now, in November, if you haven’t already. Have it before budgets are finalized. Finance teams start locking in numbers in late November and early December. If you have the conversation in mid-December, you’re working with a budget that’s already set in stone, and you’re much less likely to move the needle. If you have it in mid-November, there’s still time for your manager to make the case to their boss, and for your boss to make the case to finance.

Prepare your wins log this week. Schedule the conversation for two weeks out. That gives you time to prepare, gives your manager time to think about what they can do, and puts you in the window when budgets are still malleable.

The worst outcome of this conversation is a “no.” The worst outcome of not having it at all is a year where inflation outpaced your salary while you silently accepted what you were offered because you were too anxious to ask. You’ve delivered value this year. You’ve stayed while others left. You’ve grown. That’s worth putting into a conversation, and it’s worth having it now.