I'm still early in my career, but the last two rounds of interviews I've done have yielded initial offers with a spread of $100k+/yr in total comp and $60k+/yr in base salary.

Just to have concrete numbers to work with, suppose initial offers exactly correspond to final pay and that you're currently making toward the lower end of that range (e.g. because raises haven't kept up with your increased skill and increased market demand).

If you're currently making $X/yr (total comp), you think you _might_ be worth $X+$50k to somebody, and you spit out $X+$50k as your target range, a prospective employer could generously offer $X+$60k and you'd be happy as a clam and none the wiser while missing out on a new Tesla per year in extra pay.

There's a separate argument that if you'd be happy with $X+$60k then you shouldn't try to squeeze your employer for more, but I'll let somebody else make it if they'd like. Regardless, that big of a spread really does exist, and I imagine it grows further into one's career.

I think my concern really is about the final 'negotiated' compensation & the parent's universal strategy to get there. I would imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) that regardless of the spread of the initial offers, you can reach a final negotiated compensation that is more or less in line with your market value. I would imagine that the more seasoned you are, the better you are at estimating your market value. You have a relatively clear eyed belief about what the final negotiated compensation would be, so why not just pad that as your starting bid? What's the downside? The parent's strategy of never revealing your number first doesn't make sense in that regard. For a seasoned worker, I don't see the payoffs at all.

I have over 10 years of experience and was recently on the job market. The highest paid job I was pitched by a recruiter paid more than double the lowest paid job I was pitched.

You’d be surprised.

Specially in small/medium companies, a lot of the times businesses don’t know what they are looking for.

I know of a place that was looking for a “hardware engineer with 10y experience”. The average salary for this kind of job posting is not that high, they offered way more, but that’s because the actual position was “we’re looking for someone to become COO, and we need him to understand hardware development because the rest of the team doesn’t”.

I understand that this sort of situation might arise, especially in smaller companies that are still building institutional wisdom and are out of sync with the market. That said, is this really the case most of the time, to justify developing your entire strategy around it? As the sibling comments suggest, the greater the delta between expectations of the two parties, the less worthwhile the whole endeavor is. The parent comments suggest that the strategy to never disclose expectations pays off precisely because there could be a wide delta between the expectations, AND you're underselling yourself. I don't know enough about the industry to know how often these happen, to justify this approach.

The difference between expectations can be more than 100% of the lower number.

That is surprising to me, but more pertinently, how often is this the case? Even if expectations don't match, how often do you actually undercut the recruiter's expectations? I would think most people would have a reasonable ballpark idea of what the recruiter has in mind - so just overshoot and then get negotiated down from there. The suggested tactic only really makes sense to me if you frequently expect to be undercutting what the recruiter's got in mind, and even then by a lot.

To my layman understanding, the larger the difference between expectations, the lower the value in this tactic of not revealing your expectations.

Young engineers often undercut their value by a lot. That's part of why they are popular

I agree (and expect) that people new to the job market would be poor estimators of their market value. They would also have the least room to negotiate.

True. juniors dont know their market value and that makes it easy to get them stuck in low-paying jobs