I'm not sure that's true. Google is a notoriously tough negotiator - not just for salaries, but for their food suppliers, data center locations, acquisitions, basically everything - but it's also a pretty good place to work. I've heard Warren Buffett and the Berkshire Hathaway properties are too.
The best people to do business with seem to treat negotiation as a business transaction that they will press every advantage they have on, but then once you're in, you're in, and they'll be loyal to you. And they expect you to do the same. It seems to be worth cultivating that skill - respecting the other party, but also respecting yourself enough to ask for what you want and be willing to walk if you can't get it.
Come to think of it, this is generally called "assertiveness" and is typically seen as a desirable quality in life.
As for naming any number first, meh? If you give a number first, you'll be negotiating your salary down from it; if the employer names a number first, you'll be negotiating up from that. You might prefer the theoretically unlimited upside of the latter. On the other hand, loss aversion is more powerful than gain seeking, making downward concessions harder won.
Of course, that assumes both parties in the negotiation are rational and sophisticated. A typical developer is brilliant at designing software, absolutely terrible at understanding markets, and devastatingly introverted, and so is likely to lowball themselves. You will very rarely do much better than the first number you give. If you think you're not up to the challenge, putting the first number on the table may be a bad move. It depends.
What doesn't depend is your current salary. Everyone is going to ask for it. There's nothing wrong with asking. But don't cough it up.
I've never answered that, but that should be entertainingly confusing, if you're not in any particular need of the job and have a strong bargaining position. (Or if they're really cool people.)
If they say 80k and then you say, casually, "Oh, really? I was thinking more like 175k." then I don't think you're going to be stuck at a 10-25% upward mobility.
You might blow the negotiation, but you aren't stuck at 80k+25% max. And you shouldn't be worried about blowing negotiation. If 125k would work for both of you, it's still possible after this start. If they are rational, and you are rational, there is no reason you can't proceed to figure that out.
Since you can always do something like this to totally ignore/invalidate/reject their first number, I don't think letting them give the first number is dangerous.
But if they say 80k and then you say "let's add 5k because reason X, and 5k because reason Y" and then after that you try to get another 5k for reason Z, repeat, then yeah you're going to have a hard time getting very far away from the 80k initial number.
Meanwhile if you say the first number and give 175k, then if they are terrible at negotiating they might not be able to lower it more than 10-25%, but don't count on that.
How many people are competent at negotiating and able to rejecting initial frames when appropriate I'm not sure. If you are terrible at negotiating, or you think the other guys might be bad at it, then in both cases I guess saying the first number is safer. But be warned: if you say a high number and they suck at negotiating too much, they might just not hire you. Sometimes there is a number you can agree on but they ask you to come down to a number above their max and then even though you say "sure" they still have to come up with a reason to cancel the deal. This is dumb, but it happens.
I think you should be careful with sentiment analysis on a forum like HN. This place is overwhelmingly populated with people for whom the concept of salary negotiation is repellant. One could get a seriously skewed idea of what to expect from negotiations from comments on HN.
The fact is, a huge number of places that you'd actually want to work at are going to treat salary negotiation as the business transaction that it is. Not taking the transaction seriously is going to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.
It's true: the worst places to work will be the ones who are most aggressive about negotiation. But that observation totally misses Patrick's point. You don't have to get screwed by a hard-nosed negotiation to lose out on thousands of dollars of comp. In fact, if you don't take negotiation seriously, you'll lose thousands of dollars without even noticing, because your social norms will blind you to what's happening. Patrick isn't just talking about how to handle stupidly tough negotiations. He's talking about all of them, even the nice and friendly ones.
The range between your negotiating floor and the employer's negotiating ceiling is the spread. Any dollar figure you accept below their ceiling is a dollar you gave them. From the way people talk about negotiation on HN, my guess is that 9 times out of 10, HN'ers take a number smack in the middle of the spread --- meaning, they've coughed up high 4 digits (and often 5) back to their employer. And they feel good about it! They write blog posts about it!
If you think you work on a team where you don't have to negotiate, because everyone's grown-up and knows the score and pays people what they're worth, seriously consider that you may (probably not intentionally, but still) be getting played.