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Comment by OhHeyItsE | Hacker News Reader

I've had multiple situations where I did answer (honestly, too - before I knew any better) the "dreaded" question up front and had the recruiter tell me: "Wow. You must work for a really great company! We can't even come close to matching that." Process ended right there, countless time saved. So, as with all things, YMMV.

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Same here. As soon as I say what I make recruiters usually congratulate me on making what I make and won't call me back. So recruiters are only good for run of the mill, entry level folks, not really for highly skilled or specialized developers.

Yes, they're frequently just looking for butts to put in chairs. Getting the numbers out of the way first helps to avoid wastes of time. But the other side is true also for more junior or underpaid developers. They need to use tactics like these to get themselves to the right side of the bell curve. Once you've developed the experience and skills and had the good luck necessary to move you into the upper range of compensation, it helps to tell them right away to avoid wasting time with employers who aren't interested in paying up for senior talent. Again, though, if you know the potential employer has paid rates / compensation in the range you are looking for in the past, it is also safe to delay because you may get a better offer even coming from an already high compensation.

It depends what kind of recruiters you use. At the end of the day, the company that hires the recruiters (whether they're in-house or an external company) should be fine tuning the recruiter's filtering system. With enough patience and direction they can be excellent to find high skilled individuals who are looking for a new job.

If they're just looking for butts in seats, why do crooters stop talking to you unless you have at least n years experience (n often quite large) in the client's exact tech stack? "They're looking for a candidate who's ready to hit the ground running..."

Because they don't want to waste their time on someone their client won't agree to hire. It's a numbers game, and from a time perspective, meeting you for coffee and shopping your resume around isn't completely free.

Years of experience in the client's stack are a pretty good proxy for whether the employer will want to talk to you.

To clarify my original comment - I was talking about in-house recruiters. Ones that have a vested interest in negotiating you down.

3rd-party recruiters? They just want you to take the first offer you get so they get paid. Tell them whatever you want.

You can figure that information out pretty quickly without needing to disclose your current salary. It might take a LITTLE longer, but not THAT much longer. I think an extra few hours is worth multiple thousands of dollars every year.

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