[gaius]

The "we're all thieves" bit I guess (the downmodder wasn't me).

Anyway, it's wrong: your new employer has to know your previous salary so they can calculate your tax correctly. If you lie about it, you will get caught. Lying in an interview/on a CV == instant dismissal.

[lsc]

now, I am not advocating lying... but at least here in America, the employer has the employee fill out worksheets to figure tax deductions, then at the end of the year the employee evens up with the IRS. (if your calculations are off and you underpay by more than a certain amount, you have to pay penalties on top of paying the owed taxes, so the employee has an incentive to get it right.) In 15 years of working, I've never had an employer ask what I was getting before outside of salary negotiations, and I've been in situations where I owned my 'previous employer' so I'd know if they tried to contact the previous employer to verify income.

So while I think lying in general is a bad strategy, in part because you don't know when you'll get caught, I'm fairly certain that American employers won't catch you through their tax calculation process.

[korch]

I think my terse reply emphasized the wrong point and was completely misunderstood. Sorry.

I am not saying to maliciously lie about being underpaid, nor about non-salary compensation to your new potential employer. What I am saying is that during the initial negotiating process, when they ask "how much did you make at your last job?", if you suspect they might try to low ball you or negotiate you down, then you can maintain the advantage by lying and telling some arbitrary higher amount. Although if this is happening to you, you probably might want to look else where for a job. Unfortunately the economic reality means that is not always possible—who hasn't accepted at least one job from an employer they would not ideally choose to work for?

This thread and my reply is about the well-known claim that in any salary negotiating process, who ever first lets slip a specific dollar amount loses the advantage in the entire process. My reply was simply to point out that the entire logic is premised on a flaw, namely that you, the job candidate, are the one telling the employer how much you used to make, and then naming that amount becomes equivalent to losing the advantage of "don't make the first move." Since in most cases your new employer has no way to even verify what your previous salary & compensation was, they are utterly reliant upon trusting that you are telling them the truth. I have no idea what later commentors were saying about telling your new employer what your previous taxes were. I have never heard of any employee being forced to share their tax info with future employers. (No doubt there are some professions and jobs where this happens, such as those elected to public office or serving the public interest.)

My point was this: in any negotiation process involving money it is a mistake to implicitly assume either party wants to be perfectly honest to their own disadvantage. If you look at any economic process like salary negotiation through the mathematical lens of Game Theory, you would never expect any "game player" to give away such an easy advantage.

Now I know this is going to offend many because it stabs the heart of the economics driving what we (falsely) believe is a strictly "ethical" matter, but please hear me out. I say we are all "small thieves" in our own context-dependent ways, because there really is no such thing as an objective "price." Rather, all prices are simply an arbitrary amount somebody is "willing & able" to pay. Any time you buy or sell, you first have to determine how much you can get from the other party. We are all skimming off the top of somebody else's profit margin, no matter how small.

No salary negotiation I've ever heard of followed this logic:

Recruiter: "how much did you make at your last job so we can trick you into making the first move and losing the advantage in this Game Theory-based negotiation?"

Candidate: "how much are you willing to pay?"

Even though in reality that is precisely what both sides are already trying to do. Size each other up and determine if both parties can agree to mutually benefit within their financial constraints. It's economics 101. But neither party will be honest and tell themselves nor the "opponent" that is what they are doing. And that's equivalent to lying—like Mark Twain said: "the worst lies are told in silence." And that is why I say we might as well throw out any ethical preconceptions and just look at it as a strictly game theoretic, economic process.

Since I don't even view this through the lens of ethics, I can playfully throw around the term "thieves" as a way of winking at the rules of the game itself. Who hasn't played cops & robbers and had fun pretending to be the robber?

To further see my point, think about the exact same situation, but inverted: if you, the candidate, were to ask anyone under the new potential employer: "how much did you make last year?", could you expect anyone to tell you? Or ask the CEO: "I might want to work for you, but how big was your bonus last year?" The conversation would come to a screeching halt right there.

In our era of Too Big to Fail, where the average CEOs makes hundreds of times the average salary of their lowest paid employee, why do so many of us "worker-bee" types have such a problem with turning the tables and fighting fire with fire? How do you think the CEO and the big guys got so big? How do you think the global Labor movement achieved so many gains on behalf of workers back in the 1920's? Why shouldn't employees be able to do the same today on a smaller scale? Fair is fair afterall.

That is all I'm saying. Stop voting down my insights just because I explained myself poorly and it sounded like something morally offensive to your biases. Where's the fun in having biases if we can't debate them on the Internet. :)

[lsc]

Recruiter: "how much did you make at your last job so we can trick you into making the first move and losing the advantage in this Game Theory-based negotiation?"

Candidate: "how much are you willing to pay?"

Isn't that how it pretty much works always? I mean, personally I'm pretty bad at negotiation. If it is something that really matters, I always need to get multiple bids. I mean, personally, I switch jobs fairly often, so I think that my old salary is usually pretty fair... saying "I am making X now, beat that" seems to work okay. I am leaving some money on the table, yeah; The thing is, as an employee, there really isn't that much room to negotiate most places. Especially larger companies have strict guidelines for pay for particular positions. Even at smaller places, the boss is very conscious of perceived 'fairness' - The boss might not like his employees talking about money, but he knows we do it anyhow. The idea is that paying one worker more than another without an externally visible reason can be damaging to the business above and beyond the extra cash expended.

The problem is that the employee is at a /massive/ disadvantage, even if she is a good negotiator. As an employee, you are applying for a job designed for people who are not primarily driven by money... and you are competing with other people who are also primarily not driven by money. If you apply for a full-time employee position, you are saying that you don't really care that much about maximizing your cash return on your time... that's not what full time jobs are for.

Listen to all this talk of 'work-life balance' - most jobs are not designed for people who want to retire at 30. most jobs are designed to be comfortable enough that you can do them most of your life. And really, that's what most people want.

It's easier to maximize cash as a contractor, 'cause people who value safety, stability and comfort leave contractor positions as soon as they can, leaving the field to the mercenary and the incompetent, so it's a place where a competent mercenary can thrive.

[lsc]

eh, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are an employee, you have already traded away money for comfort and stability. no matter what you think about the fairness of continuing to be honest in the face of what are essentially professional liars, for most of us, for various reasons, not having to lie is part of that comfort.

More cynically, many people here are not anonymous... Few few people, I imagine, are willing to publicly and non-anonymously advocate dishonesty.

[c1sc0]

I'm sorry, but where I come from it is assumed that people will pad their salaries. Most of the time I add something small like 10-20%.