I never answer questions about my past or expected salary, not to employers and not to recruiters. Most employers don't ask, and the few that have (perhaps by having a part of an employment form ask for previous salary) have never made my leaving that information out an issue. Most recruiters, if they even ask, respect my decision not to talk about it, but I've been pressed hard on this by a handful of recruiters, an…
Agree with you in principle (your previous deal with company A is absolutely none of company B's business) but I would like to challenge you on one point: > I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first. ... This is unlikely to be true. Generally, in price negotiations it is advantageous to name a number first. This is known as anchoring and basically the theory is that the end result is bette…
In one place that I worked at, salary for a common technical job title (n=100) varied by 50%. The mechanics were pretty obvious. People who worked their way up got screwed with the 10% raise bullshit, and people who came in through some other means were able to extract higher salaries.
Where I find this stuff annoying is where there is no signal about the salary level. One placed I spoke to many years ago was advertising for a position that was probably worth $100-105k in the market, but they were hiring at $50k.