Until companies start offering the salary that they are expecting to pay for the position in their initial offer, you're always going to have to ask for more to get it.
There are a few startups (Buffer or maybe Zapier?) that are doing this. Offers are very one-sided, the company has all of the information and you have none. By not negotiating a better offer, you're leaving money on the table. It doesn't help that there's a taboo in our society around negotiation and bargaining.
Here, that prospect is nil unless you win the equity lottery at some startup, but gambling in serial with your career makes this REALLY hard to pull off.
A six-figure salary in the Bay Area dooms you to renting for the rest of your life, and the rental situation here, with its converted living room bedrooms, roommates, and closet-sized apartments, SUCKS.
The rent is so high here that it feels like you're living paycheck-to-paycheck on a $120k salary.
You'd be happiest staying in Texas.
You mentioned Gilroy, the price situation (800k, 4M, 1M, 1M, 600k are the first 5 results) doesn't even look much better than in SF proper:
http://www.zillow.com/gilroy-ca/
Moreover, they don't really have condos in Gilroy.
Detached house (needs work) $359k https://www.redfin.com/CA/Gilroy/7270-Alexander-St-95020/hom...
Condo in Morgan Hill @ $446k: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Morgan-Hill/112-La-Crosse-Dr-95037...
Detached 3/2 SFH @ $500k https://www.redfin.com/CA/Gilroy/374-Walnut-Ln-95020/home/10...
Nice townhouse @ $495k: https://www.redfin.com/CA/GILROY/7664-GENNARO-WAY-9502/home/...
$250k gets you a two-story house with an actual YARD there.
Pittsburgh's tech scene is great now, too: Carnegie Mellon (CMU), Google Pittsburgh, Uber (self-driving car lab), Oculus Research, Duolingo, and a plethora of other startups. There's even seed investors here now! Even Paul Graham, a Pittsburgh native, is getting involved again.
I mention this to someone here, and 9 times out of 10 the reaction is along the lines of "Pittsburgh?! Why would you EVER want to live there?" Oftentimes, the person who cannot conceive the possibility of living a happy life outside of Silicon Valley's bubble either has an inherited house that ballooned in value, or they're still renting at age 35.
I'm a huge fan of getting out of Silicon Valley. Cashing in on BigCo salary for a few years and then buying a house in TX/PA/wherever in cash is a totally valid game plan. I think it's hilarious that our industry essentially invented modern telecommuting yet uses it so rarely.
As an aside, $250k may get you a nice house in PA, but the salaries are correspondingly lower. If you can't get paid substantially more in the Bay Area there's really no good reason to be/stay/move here since everything's so expensive.
It's not even that though, $1M now gets you what's called a "fixer-upper" in SF -- a euphemism which actually means a house with broken gas lines that you literally risk your life occupying.
It's also impossible to save money here for a future house in a cheaper city when the median rent is $4000/month.
But what if they say yes? You did not enable that to be an opportunity. You took things as they are, rather than considering what they could be.
Opportunities are not black/white. It is extremely rare that a company's first offer is their highest. Most companies expect a counter. Each side has to show some of their cards before making a compromise.
> I expected more of a conversation after I declined
Guessing the recruiter felt the same way. "A call would have been nice" was the chance to have more of a conversation! It's where they say "what went wrong?" and you say "it's all great but I did the math and I need another $15k (or whatever) for the move to make sense" and they say "if I can get you $10k will you accept today?" and this is called negotiation.
And don't kid yourself, it's all negotiating about money. I'd work waist-deep in cow feces programming a Facebook clone on an AS/400 with actively hostile coworkers if it paid $2 million/day. Let's be real, there's always a price. Maybe it's not realistic, but it's there.
For me, it's easier to negotiate conversationally. These are my roadblocks for taking the job, how do we solve them together? Let the recruiter get creative. In most negotiations you don't have the monopoly on solutions -- know your must-haves and collaborate with the other party. It doesn't have to be adversarial.
The company is not buying trinkets at a flea market. It's trying to rent skilled labor in a competitive market. If you pay me less than I'm worth, I can usually find a higher bidder. So there is the price you can pay to get me to work for you next month, and there is a higher price you can pay to hire me and get me to stop seeking offers from other employers for the next N months.
And the possibility that someone would walk away rather than counter is the very thing that keeps initial offers reasonable for everybody. It is the very same principle behind unionized collective bargaining, without the cartel enforcer of the union. The Nash equilibrium is to always negotiate individually, because you will usually get more money, but the strategy that benefits the whole class (tech employees) the most in aggregate is for most of us to not negotiate at all, and to judge the first offer as the only offer, because that ensures that tech employers always have to open with their best possible offer, or risk losing the candidate entirely.
Fortunately for tech employers, tech employees don't have enough solidarity or a strong enough cartel enforcer to accept any common negotiations strategy.
My biggest salary negotiation was part phone, part email. But the relationship was collaborative, so it worked.
I'd love to hear those controversial opinions.
Not that this is the interviewee's fault in any way. But being open makes it simpler.