This would work fine except you may not have a ton of time to waste. The problem is, in practice, as someone with an outlier comp, you may end up having to go interview at a company only to realize at the end of the whole interview dance when they cough up a number that such number is nowhere close to your expectations.

(That said, I completely agree that it is generally good advice to not disclose your salary expectations in most cases. This is especially true for junior hackers without full awareness of the market conditions, who I have seen consistently underestimate their salary potential.)

As another poster noted, the best way to resolve this is to ask the recruiter up front what the salary range at play is. If they still won't disclose, you have to make a calculated risk based on how much you like the org and how much they seem likely to offer.

Yes, and many savvy recruiters would make you make the calculated risk anyway. Note that at that stage, the recruiters are highly incentivized to say or allude to "we can beat everyone/are competitive" without saying a number and make you interview with the company at the beginning of the process (with various excuses, including not having the authority to talk about actual numbers and that decision being prorogued to a distinct person/team, but rest assured that we beat others according to your interview performance) and you later learn their guesstimate was far off.

The solution to this is easy: don't bother with that uncooperative recruiter. Remember, we're talking about trying to jump from one high paying job to a higher paying job here, so why bother with uncooperative recruiters? They need you much worse than you need them.

I agree. Following that recipe, you decide on ending the phone call with a nice, but uncooperative about blurting out a number recruiter who claims they can be competitive.

Now the question is this: if you are willing to blow off the whole process anyway on that call, why not at least try giving them a number and give them a chance and see if they would beat it?

> why not at least try giving them a number and give them a chance and see if they would beat it?

If it's obvious that the recruiter is uncooperative or that the role isn't prestigious/top-tier, this is exactly what one should do.

The reaction to blowout numbers may just surprise you, and perhaps not for the better..

In my life I've been more upset by a lack of resistance in negotiations (of any kind) than immediate supplication, because it invariably means: "I could've done better, my appraisal was wrong"

Sure, if you want to interview for the position so badly, name some arbitrary high number. But Patrick's original point is that you should never disclose your current salary or the number you're truly willing to settle for, since it sets a premature upper ceiling on what you could end up making.

> many savvy recruiters

Again we must discern between "internal recruiters" and recruiting agencies.

Reputable third-party recruiting agencies will not play this game:

  - They know their clients.

  - They know how prior placements have been compensated.

  - They only get paid if you get placed.

  - They have 10 other companies they might be able place you at with higher likelihood.

"Internal recruiters" should be seen as any other adversarial negotiator: hopefully in a weaker position.

"I've got 3 other offers on the table right now, my time is extremely limited. I am sure you can understand: I cannot afford to waste time on unsuitable roles. What is the top-end of your range for this position?"

And really, you need to know what you are worth, or this number is meaningless. Once they've dropped the top-end of the range, you can give an ultimatum: "Match and exceed companies A, B, C." or "I would be willing to take a risk and go down this interview track, but understand from the onset: your top-end is at least $xx,xxx lower than I would consider. Furthermore, I do not wish to be the most well-compensated employee on my team, which might detract from my desire to proceed."

You would have to waste a lot of time for it not to be worth it. Lets say through your entire interview process at multiple companies, it adds an extra 10 hours. If that gets you $10k a year (or more) over 5 years, I am pretty sure that is worth it.

You need to multiply that with the probability of the companies not beating your current salary. The higher your current salary, this probability will go higher, and your interview cost will too. In effect, interviewing not being worth your time is proportional to your salary squared--not a linear relation.

Yeah, but once you get established enough (which you probably are if your salary is really high), then 95% of interviewing is you looking at the work they are doing and deciding if you want to do it, and salary negotiation. When you are good, the filtering on your part should come way before interviewing.

"Yeah, but once you get established enough (which you probably are if your salary is really high), then 95% of interviewing is you looking at the work they are doing and deciding if you want to do it, and salary negotiation. "

Ideally, but not always practically, especially as a software developer.

A large complicating factor of the whole "when to start talking about required salary numbers" is the fact that in computer software development no matter how established you are you are still often expected to do some ridiculous multi-day dance of interviewing to separately prove to n number of people that you can actually string code together (even if there's already ample evidence to prove you can, such as successfully shipped applications at prior jobs, repos full of open source code written, etc).

Interviewing for software jobs is (still) just incredibly broken in ways that make waiting to talk about salary until a later time a very dangerous game.

The last interview process I went through was three weeks and four separate meetings (1 long email, 1 online test, 1 phone interview, and 1 in-person interview). All in all, it was about 9 hours of dealing with them, plus a 2 hour round trip to their office and having to take a half day at my current job. They never asked about salary expectations and I never gave any (a mistake on my part, I believe) and when they finally made an offer, it came in a full 25% under my current salary (which is what I had been looking for). Asking around, a few other devs received similar offers that they turned down from that company.

I feel that I could have saved myself the majority of those 9 hours if I had told them my salary expectations from the beginning. They would have either balked immediately or told me the position wasn't going to be paid that and we would have been done. I think that is how I will handle things going forward, personally.

> I feel that I could have saved myself the majority of those 9 hours if I had told them my salary expectations from the beginning

Or you could've asked their range upfront, and then you could be the one disqualifying and doing the balking. This information is freely given to third-party recruiting agencies (if they use them) as well.

For me, this serves more purposes than knowing what I'll get paid. I need to know that my coworkers are well-compensated: it's a huge indicator of the quality of team you'll be working with.

Sure, it's possible that the entire team is grossly overpaid, though it's not likely. You'll find out their competency in the interview loop.

> Or you could've asked their range upfront

LOLOL You'll get

"we pay market rate"

which is a ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLAR WIDE gulf of market inefficiency