[Baypiggies] Salary Requirements Questions

[Roderick Llewellyn]

Re: Nathan Yergler's comment: well if the employer has such a good idea of 
what the position is worth (such that they might offer the candidate more 
than candidate's figure), and also knows the maximum they are willing to 
pay, and wants to avoid wasting everybody's time, why don't they just 
publish the figure (or range) in their job posting? After all, the job 
posting occurs first; the candidate responds to the posting. That way if 
their range is too low from my perspective I won't even bother applying. But 
that rarely happens, right? So I think that indicates that this isn't the 
reason for asking the figure. The reason is to gain a negotiating advantage. 
In your specific case, it's nice that they made you an offer above your 
asking price, but I suspect that's rare.
After all, if companies routinely made offers in their range, even if the 
offer was much higher than my required salary, my strategy should be to ask 
for: zero! That maximizes my chance of getting an offer, by surely being 
lower than the range, and I can just extend that "trust" you are talking 
about that they will offer me an appropriate amount.
- Rod L.

in response to:
===============
I was considering applying for a position with an east coast company
that does all Python, and they explicitly state that they require
"salary requirements" with resumes.  I was chatting with the CTO at
PyCon that year and expressed my reservations about that.  He
basically said, "look, it's in no one's interest for us to talk to
people who require a salary outside our means; it's not a good use of
time and it's not fiscally responsible for us to convince ourselves
that they're worth it and stretch ourselves too thin.  It's also not
in our best interest to pay someone just what they require if we want
to retain them.  So hopefully people see it as an opportunity to start
a mutually beneficial, trusting relationship."  I think the thing that
struck me was that I was assuming "the man" was out to get me, and
here the man was saying "we're trusting you to do our business, we
require some trust in return."