[distant_hat]

That's a sound advice for bonds but jobs are largely not like that by design. It is kind of like dating, and asking for a price upfront makes it closer to whoredom and companies explicitly downgrade you for being in it only for the money. If you want to sell a bond and the other person's price is too low, you don't sell it and that's that. For interviews, you end up spending hours through the interview process and may not even know whether you will end up getting a salary quote at the end of it. Getting multiple quotes is a great idea, but putting it in action is harder than it appears. It may help to go with someone like a recruiter who can disintermediate the process. I've often thought someone like an agent for software professionals could make a great idea. That person's job is to get you great gigs and good prices and she makes a percentage of your salary so is aligned with getting you the best offers.

[GVIrish]

Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate.

Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.

Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.