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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

When negotiating salary, always throw the first figure, and make it higher than you expect. It's called anchoring (read about it in Thinking Fast and Slow). It is a lot easier to come down to 120->100/hr then it is to come up from 50->100/hr.

This can be applied to selling/buying a home and a lot of other things.

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That is exactly why you never throw the first figure. If you throw out 120, and they expected to pay 200, you just lost out big time.

If you're living in a world where people are prepared to pay much more for your work than you first thought, eventually you're going to end up pretty happy

i understand the psychology behind it but it's also a bit dangerous: where i work (europe) we don't even engage when the candidates claim a much higher rate than what we would agree on

Right, it should be higher than you expect but it shouldn't be too high. If you expect €100 and ask for 20% more it should be safe if the company is willing to pay €80. If they aren't it's probably too much of a mismatch in expectations to make everybody happy.

But a candidate can only do this well if they know the market to within 20%, which might take a fair bit of research and asking around.

Presumably you're probably filtering out extremely talented engineers that know what they are worth then?

Perhaps? They could also be filtering out candidates that lack adequate self awareness.

Hiring in many ways relies on heuristics, and isn't perfect.

Aren't we all underpaid? I for one :)

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