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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

This would limit your options, though.

This limits options that are unwilling to meet your requirements; places you would have passed on due to insufficient salaries anyway. If you're willing to take lower salaries, lower your minimal salary requirements to receive more of them.

Dictating salary reqs up front does two things:

1. Reduces time wasted on folks or orgs that don't want to pay your rate.

2. Immediately moves discussion away from a dance around salary to salary _negotiation_. Any good HR org that can't meet your salary reqs and still wants you will try to compensate in other ways (stocks, RSUs, benefits, bonuses, etc).

It limits your options down. If you say you're looking for $100/hour, and the recruiter was planning on giving you $150/hour…guess what offer you're going to get?

I have never seen this in practice (but I'm sure it happens all the time). At the places I've worked/hired, if a candidate's ask was below the bottom of the range we paid that role, we just paid them the bottom of the range (regardless of their ask). It's a win/win from a hiring perspective. You hired a candidate for the minimum you possibly could (from a budget perspective) and the candidate is grateful you didn't hire them on their bad ask.

At some terrible companies even, it's harder to hire someone outside of their defined salary band. Even if you don't care about being nice or paying fairly, your life is just made easier by paying them the bottom of the range rather than dealing with HR about salary bands.

It also saves you huge amounts of time dealing with bullshit recruiters and companies. And if your ask is off by 50% then you did a shit job of understanding your actual market value in the first place and will hopefully do a better job in the future.

As if there would be an "actual market value". There isn't one number. Maybe there is a company out there that you perfectly match with and which is ready to pay you twice of what other would pay you.

That’s why you never say “you are looking for $100/hour”, you say “I’m making $100/hour but conditions here are nice”.

I'd actually recommend the opposite. I want them to come in above my current salary — simply hitting my salary means their deal is basically the same as my current deal, plus a bunch of unknowns around the work, the environment, the company. If I'm going to switch companies, it should advantage me to do so. (And IME, if you give exactly the salary, they'll come in as little above it as possible. I am naming what I want, not what I already have.)

(I also agree with many of the parents: you don't really want to be the first mover — it isn't advantageous — but recruiters are very rarely going to give you that, and will force your hand in naming a number first.)

Well the thing is that if they name a number first they will assess whether you'd go for the 100 even if they would top out at 150 and then just offer you the 100 or say 110 or something. This will set the "tone" and the base number for negotiation. Your mind will be thinking "he said 110, so I guess they might go to 120" so you'll maybe ask for 130 and accept the 120 they offer you next.

Queue up yourself asking for 150 coz you make 100 right now and you did your research. The recruiter might just begrudgingly give you the 150 they were prepared to go to anyway coz you seem to know your stuff. Of maybe he's gonna haggle you down to 140. Big deal. But you set the tone of the conversation. This is not gonna work if you don't know your worth but either way either you are gonna lowball yourself and they will just accept or they are gonna lowball it.

Episode 10 here but the rest are awesome too:

https://slate.com/business/negotiation

They don't need to know your current salary.

Absolutely agree. Some will ask what your current salary is outright. None of their business, they just need to know what I want them to pay me.

To play Devil's Advocate, and I ask as someone not in the industry (I'm in academia) - is the difference between expectations really that large?

I would imagine (perhaps unreasonably) that a relatively seasoned person on the job market would have a reasonable understanding of their market value within a few percentage points - so the recruiter might be willing to pay up to $105/hour, while you low balled it at $100/hour.

I'm still early in my career, but the last two rounds of interviews I've done have yielded initial offers with a spread of $100k+/yr in total comp and $60k+/yr in base salary.

Just to have concrete numbers to work with, suppose initial offers exactly correspond to final pay and that you're currently making toward the lower end of that range (e.g. because raises haven't kept up with your increased skill and increased market demand).

If you're currently making $X/yr (total comp), you think you _might_ be worth $X+$50k to somebody, and you spit out $X+$50k as your target range, a prospective employer could generously offer $X+$60k and you'd be happy as a clam and none the wiser while missing out on a new Tesla per year in extra pay.

There's a separate argument that if you'd be happy with $X+$60k then you shouldn't try to squeeze your employer for more, but I'll let somebody else make it if they'd like. Regardless, that big of a spread really does exist, and I imagine it grows further into one's career.

I think my concern really is about the final 'negotiated' compensation & the parent's universal strategy to get there. I would imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) that regardless of the spread of the initial offers, you can reach a final negotiated compensation that is more or less in line with your market value. I would imagine that the more seasoned you are, the better you are at estimating your market value. You have a relatively clear eyed belief about what the final negotiated compensation would be, so why not just pad that as your starting bid? What's the downside? The parent's strategy of never revealing your number first doesn't make sense in that regard. For a seasoned worker, I don't see the payoffs at all.

I have over 10 years of experience and was recently on the job market. The highest paid job I was pitched by a recruiter paid more than double the lowest paid job I was pitched.

You’d be surprised.

Specially in small/medium companies, a lot of the times businesses don’t know what they are looking for.

I know of a place that was looking for a “hardware engineer with 10y experience”. The average salary for this kind of job posting is not that high, they offered way more, but that’s because the actual position was “we’re looking for someone to become COO, and we need him to understand hardware development because the rest of the team doesn’t”.

I understand that this sort of situation might arise, especially in smaller companies that are still building institutional wisdom and are out of sync with the market. That said, is this really the case most of the time, to justify developing your entire strategy around it? As the sibling comments suggest, the greater the delta between expectations of the two parties, the less worthwhile the whole endeavor is. The parent comments suggest that the strategy to never disclose expectations pays off precisely because there could be a wide delta between the expectations, AND you're underselling yourself. I don't know enough about the industry to know how often these happen, to justify this approach.

The difference between expectations can be more than 100% of the lower number.

That is surprising to me, but more pertinently, how often is this the case? Even if expectations don't match, how often do you actually undercut the recruiter's expectations? I would think most people would have a reasonable ballpark idea of what the recruiter has in mind - so just overshoot and then get negotiated down from there. The suggested tactic only really makes sense to me if you frequently expect to be undercutting what the recruiter's got in mind, and even then by a lot.

To my layman understanding, the larger the difference between expectations, the lower the value in this tactic of not revealing your expectations.

Young engineers often undercut their value by a lot. That's part of why they are popular

I agree (and expect) that people new to the job market would be poor estimators of their market value. They would also have the least room to negotiate.

True. juniors dont know their market value and that makes it easy to get them stuck in low-paying jobs

The suggestion assumes most of the asymmetry between you and the company is not informational. You should strive to be well informed about what the salary range is. For well known tech companies, this is easy with sites like levels.fyi. Otherwise you can ask in your own network. It follows that you should also strive to be well networked.

Negotiation is an adversarial game played between humans. Therefore there can't be any simple advice except to get better at the things that make you more competitive at negotiation itself. Instead of subscribing to basic rules like, "never give the first number!", put yourself in a position of being well networked, well informed and experienced. Then you can decide how to negotiate well on the fly according to the context. You will probably earn vastly more by focusing on those areas than you will by diligently following simple rules of thumb.

For example: I received an offer from Stripe and got them to add a $100k sign on bonus to it even though I previously gave the first number. Which party gives the first number doesn't matter.

> If you're willing to take lower salaries, lower your minimal salary requirements to receive more of them.

To me that feels more complicated in Silicon Valley with equity. Once a minimum salary is met, I'll care about total compensation, not just the base salary. I'd be nervous that mentioning a low salary could lower an offer, and I don't a have reasonable number for salary I would accept if the company doesn't give much equity.

That should be the purpose I assume, unless you are in a stressing position where you would be willing to accept a lower paying job.

From my experience recruiters prefer to be told the salary ranges you are looking for to no waste their time neither yours.

Well, of course they do. That gives them more information about you "for free", which would be useful to them if your salary ask is below what they had imagined you would want.

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