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Comment by Infernal | Hacker News Reader

The first half of your post reduces to "know how much the prospective employer is willing to pay". Anchoring high only works if you know what "high" is. If the recruiter had a 150k-200k range in mind, and you throw out 150k, then you've just cheated yourself.

There's lots of advice in this thread to "know what you're worth", but where is that signal coming from?

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Here is a simple heuristic that's worked well for me: look at all of the job ads online for similar roles in the same city. Most will not name numbers. Find the highest listed number (top of range) in all of those ads and add 20%. That is a place where you will not be selling yourself short. You may not be maximizing your comp, but you will be above the average. Just understand this may disqualify you from jobs where they only pay below average. You need to be comfortable with being disqualified for high comp.

In addition to highest published umber + 20%, I would advise to carefully read any stated salaries on message boards like this when they come along and pay attention to the highest numbers. Then you will be aware of what is possible.

You might be able to compare salaries like that, but cross comparing equity is much more difficult.

yeah but equity * likely outcome is going to be comparable to a lottery ticket, not hard cash, unless you are 100% sure you can pick startup winners, and if you can why aren't you just into the funding market making 1000x than a developer per year?

You don't have to be 100% sure to be able to boost your odds.

One way to boost your odds towards picking a winner is to join in the employee ~15-25 spots. Early enough that equity is on the table, but late enough that some traction has been proven already to dampen your risk.

Market research, competitive offers, friends... there are a lot of sources. If you don't have at least a sense, it doesn't matter what negotiation tactic you're using. Maxing out at $200k would just be a factor of luck or a mistake on the part of the company.

Anchoring is merely a technique: the first half of my post boils down to "it's ok to throw out the first number".

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