From my experience, naming your price works in your favor if you are aggressive. People having similar positions are paid at 20% difference all dependent on their negotiation skills. Also, companies usually don't have set budgets for positions. It's quite fluid depending on the person being recruited and their other offers and expectations. You need to make it work in your favor. If you send up leaving money on the table, it just shows you did not come prepared. Besides, there's nothing wrong in getting what you asked for even if in another set of circumstances, with some amount of luck, you could have gotten more.

I would disagree with what you're saying about companies not having set budgets. They may have a range but it's certainly a set range. The larger the organization the more hard the range likely is due to the fact that the hiring manager doesn't even set the range, HR does based on salary comps.

Completely agree that giving previous comp information or comp expectations can only hurt you as an employee. The only thing giving this information will do is provide a company the information they need to pay you less than they might have otherwise.

I think it is difficult for employees to judge what they're truly worth. Therefore, when most people give a number, that number will be lower than what an employer may be willing to pay (and perhaps lower than the company's initial offer would be). I would guess this holds doubly true for graduates of a bootcamp, or recent college graduates, who have less industry experience on which to base their judgment of business value.

The problem is that most companies won't provide an offer until you've gone through interviews which are expensive for both parties.

So this reasoning holds if you have an abundance of time, but you can generally figure out what their likely range is going to be. Do research, ask colleagues, etc. Anchor at the high end of that - you can also leave it vague by talking about 'total comp' which can includes subjective things like equity, location, vacation, etc. You may loose some value by doing this but it'll also mean you won't waste time and so you'll only be interviewing in places that are in your ballpark.

We always (sort of) go first by sharing our comp ranges to candidates. If either of us are way off why waste each other's time? We do ask for comp history. We try to be very fair and we rarely end up needing to negotiate at all.

I almost always reject companies out of hand that ask for comp history. It signals a desire to lowball the candidate and/or a company's lack of faith in their own ability to ascertain talent. Neither bode well for working there even if the request is later rescinded.

Asking for the candidate's expected compensation, OTOH, is fine, although a little tacky.

I'm not confusing two sales concepts - you are. I don't know much about 'first to talk', but my limited understanding is that it means just that (the person who engages first in a negotiation comes out worse). Anchoring is about setting the parameters of the negotiation - you don't need to speak first.

>>In negotiations, anchoring refers to the concept of setting a boundary that outlines the basic constraints for a negotiation; subsequently, the anchoring effect is the phenomenon in which we set our estimation for the true value of the item at hand.[5] In addition to the initial research conducted by Tversky and Kahneman, multiple other studies have shown that anchoring can greatly influence the estimated value of an object. [0]

Do you or your Roman generals (who probably wouldn't be fighting each other anyway, but that's besides the point) have any hard data/sources you can show that demonstrate a link between anchoring and coming off worse in a negotiation?

You can hurt yourself by giving a number, but you're more likely to help yourself if you choose a realistic but slightly high number and indicate that you are willing to negotiate based on non-monetary factors.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring#In_negotiations

Anchoring might work if there wasn't an information asymmetry dynamic at play. But companies have way more data on salaries than applicants do. If you anchor too high, they'll just pass since they know what others are paying and know you won't get that elsewhere. If you anchor too low, the negotiations will be win-win for them. When I was hiring and someone came in too low, I'd often offer well above their anchor since I didn't want them leaving as soon as they found out how much more they were worth. But most employers don't do that.

What you're saying would be true if companies were navigating the process as blindly as candidates are. Then a high anchor could lead the employer to negotiating from a position of weakness. But, armed with data, companies don't do that.

Anchoring requires information asymmetry¹, but it requires the field to be tiled the other way around. A company can easily anchor the salary target in a negotiation. You can't.

1 - With no asymmetry both peers would have a value anchored before negotiations start.

Are you sure companies know how much other similar companies are paying?

Yes. I managed a team and had to hire many people. My company provided me with a mountain of data that was broken down by location, job title and years of experience. The data was pretty accurate, at least for San Francisco, but I have no way of knowing if the other locations were correct.

Two stupid things on their part...I got headcount, not a budget. So when negotiating salary, it wasn't in my best interest to haggle. I'd rather have happy relationships with my direct reports than know that I screwed them out of a few dollars on behalf of the company. Had they made it my duty to make the numbers add up, I might have been a bit more frugal. Oh, and they didn't filter the data to only show me positions below my title. So I went into my reviews armed with the exact market salary data that the company used to negotiate with me.

Maybe your company also wanted their staff to be happy, like you did - is it only stupid for them to do it, but not you?

> You can only hurt yourself by giving a number.

That's far too big of a generalization and I think it's easier to talk about specific scenarios. The parent comment alluded to a quite common counterexample:

1. salary range for position is 100k-150k

2. candidate is first to talk and names anywhere from $130k to $170k

3. candidate gets talked down a bit, e.g. 10%

It seems to me the candidate will still end up higher than if the company is first to talk and names $100k!