This also struck me as suffering from severe valley myopia. > What happens if the delta between you and the hiring company isn't just a few thousand, but multi

This also struck me as suffering from severe valley myopia. > What happens if the delta between you and the hiring company isn't just a few thousand, but multiple tens of thousands? Will negotiating ever bridge that gap? More often than not it will never happen, and everyone has wasted their time...yours especially. This has happened to me on a few occasions. The bottom line is that there's a wide range of a) what companies are able to pay and b) what people will work for. The end result is that without any malfeasance by either party, there are vacancies and candidates that are hopelessly mismatched with each other in terms of salary even though they are a match in terms of job description. I've had to cut a few conversations short as they were – not entirely unreasonably – trying to hire at ~50% of what I was already earning at the time. If I waited until the end of the interview process before discussing salary ranges, I'd be wasting an awful lot of my time and theirs. By all means, get them to blink first if you want. But unless you want to waste a lot of time, don't wait until the last minute before discussing salary.