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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

No. If you give your current salary during a negotiation, the other end is going to come right back with that salary +5% (at best).

Hidden information is your friend in any negotiation, but especially here, since the hiring folks also know how variable industry salary ranges are. You want to put the first move in their court - decline to give your current salary at all costs, and ideally also avoid offering up your preferred compensation number until they've made a first offer.

The only point where quoting your current salary makes sense is if the company offers less than you are currently making, and you are in such a bad situation at your current where you'd be willing to absorb the pain of changing jobs for no additional money.

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This advice functionally doesn’t work. They’ll just intentionally lowball the first offer and then say well they can’t read your mind so you need to tell them what you want.

A better strategy is to really research competitive wages and anchor high by honestly saying what you want. If they can’t come close, then walk away. If they ask you to compromise, tell them you’re not going to negotiate against yourself by stating any specific compromises, that you arrived at what you stated by considering what you’re worth, and that you’re happy to consider any kind of offer they would like to make, but that to accept an offer you have to believe it is competitive for the value you can add.

Any arguments about salaries at different cohorts of companies, or salary bands based on years of experience, just outright ignore and tell them if it’s a dealbreaker, you understand but aren’t going to compromise just because of their pay bands or random assertions about market analysis.

First of all, they cannot force you to give them your current salary. My standard answer to such question is a slightly more polite version of "it's none of your bussiness". And if they don't want to provide a salary range, and ask you to come up with the number, then just give them your current salary +50% and see how they react. Of course you might then need to step down a little, and accept your current salary + 20-30% instead, but that's still pretty good.

They won’t try to force you. They’ll just lowball the first offer, and if you say “that’s not close to what I’m seeking” then they’ll say, “well we can’t read your mind, so it’s unreasonable for you to expect us to just repeatedly guess until we hit the number you want, so you need to outline your expectations.”

If you still decline to discuss a range of expectations at that point, they will usually just drop interest in you and decline to interview you further, assuming that you might just be fishing for a high offer to use to negotiate somewhere else, or that you want way more than they could possibly offer, etc.

Thing is in many cases their low ball offer might still be more than you thought you could get. It gives a lower line, on their terms. From there you can negotiate upwards. After all it is their first offer.

They won't lowball a good candidate. People know that lowballing is a good way to lose a good candidate, that's why most companies will try to get you to state a number first rather than give out a too-high or too-low number.

If you want to know what I have in spending money, I expect the other party to show me what they have as well. It's not a fair negotiation if you play with lopsided rules.

This is the "common knowledge" thing to do, but I don't think it's always applicable. If you have an advantage in the market (e.g. are sought after), you can simply present a high figure and either they accept or you move on to the next. By playing the let-them-go-first game, you're implicitly signalling that you don't know where the ceiling is. On the other hand, if you say a high figure with confidence, they may accept it even if they weren't really prepared for that to begin with. Information asymmetry can also go the other way.

I don't necessarily disagree with you on anchoring at a high value. But moving first with your current salary is a guaranteed losing strategy.

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