[shanemhansen]

Here's a little bit of a horror story of what happens when the reverse question (engineer's current salary) is asked and answered honestly. Disclosure of current salary ultimately hurts both parties.

I was once offered a position by a certain well known Las Vegas based ecommerce company while I was living in Salt Lake and working in Park City. They asked my current salary and I told them (like a chump). When my offer finally came through it was for less than my current salary (ouch). I assumed this was a really weird way of telling me "no", so I declined the offer.

I immediately got a call from their HR wondering what the problem was. When I informed them that I wasn't going to move to Las Vegas and take a pay cut they dug in their heels and argued that their offer was really more than I was currently making since Las Vegas is so much cheaper than Park City (as I mentioned above, I never actually lived in Park City but that didn't seem to dissuade them).

If I had responded to the "how much do you make?" question by telling them how much they needed to pay me then instead of wasting everyone's time they could have terminated the interview process or even better, made their offer without being confused by irrelevant salary data.

At my most current job I told the recruiter right up front what my requirements were and told her I didn't want to fly out for an in-person interview unless we agreed on ballpark numbers. She came back with an acceptable number (which I accepted when I later saw it on the offer letter) and nobody's time was wasted. I also won't be job hopping for a tiny pay bump any time soon. Win/win.

[mallyvai]

This is exactly the right answer - if multiple rounds of deflection fail to work then you should state, "I expect a competitive offer to be $X".