"Yeah, but once you get established enough (which you probably are if your salary is really high), then 95% of interviewing is you looking at the work they are

"Yeah, but once you get established enough (which you probably are if your salary is really high), then 95% of interviewing is you looking at the work they are doing and deciding if you want to do it, and salary negotiation. " Ideally, but not always practically, especially as a software developer. A large complicating factor of the whole "when to start talking about required salary numbers" is the fact that in computer software development no matter how established you are you are still often expected to do some ridiculous multi-day dance of interviewing to separately prove to n number of people that you can actually string code together (even if there's already ample evidence to prove you can, such as successfully shipped applications at prior jobs, repos full of open source code written, etc). Interviewing for software jobs is (still) just incredibly broken in ways that make waiting to talk about salary until a later time a very dangerous game.