I agree it pretty much never hurts to ask for more salary. Outside of situations where the two sides were clearly so far apart that there was no satisfactory ou

I agree it pretty much never hurts to ask for more salary. Outside of situations where the two sides were clearly so far apart that there was no satisfactory outcome (like spreads of more than 75K+ from the offer and the candidate's expectations), I've never seen it tank an offer in any way - the worst that can happen is that the company stays firm. I will say I've been the manager at places that had a no-negotiation policy, and there were legitimate reasons for it. In our case, we wanted our policy towards salaries to be opaque, fair, and equitable, and it's hard to do that in an environment where everything is negotiated. We had strict salaries assigned per level, routinely adjusted to market (for existing employees as well as new ones). We had a few cases where this created some friction with people who assumed that any situation where a company refuses to negotiate necessarily means that a company is trying to screw you over, and that's not always the case.