That is exactly why I refuse to negotiate over compensation: I don't want to work with people who have that kind of cheapskate attitude. If they want me, they can express that by making a good offer. If the offer is low, none of the possible reasons are good for me. Why waste time haggling? Better to just move on.
Here in London you have a lot of companies that look for people with similar experience that have huge pay ranges.
A Sr. Engineer can be making anywhere from 40-45K to 110-120K a year (in general health care pays the least, fintech/finance pays the most, startups in the UK often underpay and equity is a joke if they'll even give you any (like 0.5-1% to single digit employee's straight after the accelerator).
Yes when you break it down not every company gets the same level/quality of talent but the requirements on paper are the same.
As for Salary ranges in the UK most of them post, but the ranges can be pretty huge (my company has a range of 65-110K for Sr. Engineers (which overlaps with both engineer III and Lead Engineer), and while it might appear that it's "well they are willing to pay 110 but they rather pay 60" deal there is another side to the story.
Headcount doesn't makes sense, quite often you might get a head count for a specific position say a Sr. Engineer but the team doesn't need one backfilling positions with lower grades isn't always possible so what end up being is that they'll hire people with the bare minium amount of experience needed to pass the HR filter at the lower end of the pay grade spectrum to keep enough money in their budget for pay rises or to hire external consultants.
So while huge ranges can lead to what some people see as underpaying because some one didn't ask enough or didn't had a large enough salary previously to get more it's also the case that these ranges allow teams and departments to navigate through the corporate bullshit of arranged headcounts and stupid ratios.
When you need to have 2 engineer II for every 4 engineer I, and 1 engineer III for every 5 engineer III and 1 sr engineer for every 3 engineer III and so and and so forth you really needs these huge and overlapping ranges to actually be able to hire people in a way that is sensible to the your team / department needs.
On the more anecdotal side this is what currently actually helped my team a lot we need a Sr Engineer but we don't have a headcount, but since Engineer III on the top end is about the middle field of the Sr. paygrade we can use that with a signing bonus to get the people with the experience and skills we need rather than just effectively waste money on a person that we will not be able to get from.
I've joined as a Sr on an intentionally downgraded backfill on a recommendation from a friend who works in the same department since the pay would be identical near the top end of the pay grade but having another tier to "grow into" would allow me to get a bigger raise in the future since a grade promotion has a 12.5% pay raise by default which means that if I can't get the raises I would like I can always be internally promoted to for a bigger raise, and it's much easier to be promoted from Sr to Lead than taking the tech expert or manager roles since those require more years of experience in the company for an internal promotion (again dumb policies but you can't always fight the system).
What a waste of my time. Never again.
The two people I know who came to Google as juniors are forever typecast as such and are also not being paid well.
Not Google continued to treat me better after as well. If it's bad going in it's going to stay bad.
At Google the recruiter put me in the SRE/SWE track which I was skeptical of and communicated to them. I also communicated about the compensation issues in advance saying if I got a bad offer it wasn't going to happen. Still wasted my time.
It's high for the industry if you consider the entire US or the world. The solution there is pick the right employer. The right ones are not that much harder to get into than the wrong ones especially if you play the interview game. You also need to not get caught location based comp schemes.
It's not high for a big corporation that is doing well. They just want you to think it's high so they don't have to pay and the small fry want you to think it's high because they can't afford it. These are all just line items in a budget.
Once I had that I could pick from anyone who is invested in the ecosystem.
I don't believe that has actually heavily impacted what I am paid in the sense of the credentialing being worth more to individual companies it has just made it easier to get through hiring filters and interview loops. That has made it possible to focus on companies that pay well.
Because strong, senior engineers who have been at the company for a while (say at least 5-6 years) can get total comp that is in the upper six figures when everything is factored in. That's well higher than the vast majority of other employers.
The truth is, employers are willing to pay $180k, but if someone would work for $110k[1], they'd rather find that out in advance.
Btw, I've had a recruiter from GooglAmaFaceSoft tell me in advance the max may for a position.
[1] I consider this to be a bad idea. An employee who won't negotiate a higher salary will often instead test his or her market value by interviewing elsewhere. Because these employees feel uncomfortable in salary negotiations, they are surprisingly likely to simply take the new job as a way of getting a raise. I think the reason this happens a lot is that negotiating types, who often end up in management, have trouble grasping that someone would actually quit and find a new job for a 10% pay raise rather than simply asking.