Doesn't it depend how you handle it? If they say 80k and then you say, casually, "Oh, really? I was thinking more like 175k." then I don't think you're going t

Doesn't it depend how you handle it? If they say 80k and then you say, casually, "Oh, really? I was thinking more like 175k." then I don't think you're going to be stuck at a 10-25% upward mobility. You might blow the negotiation, but you aren't stuck at 80k+25% max. And you shouldn't be worried about blowing negotiation. If 125k would work for both of you, it's still possible after this start. If they are rational, and you are rational, there is no reason you can't proceed to figure that out. Since you can always do something like this to totally ignore/invalidate/reject their first number, I don't think letting them give the first number is dangerous. But if they say 80k and then you say "let's add 5k because reason X, and 5k because reason Y" and then after that you try to get another 5k for reason Z, repeat, then yeah you're going to have a hard time getting very far away from the 80k initial number. Meanwhile if you say the first number and give 175k, then if they are terrible at negotiating they might not be able to lower it more than 10-25%, but don't count on that. How many people are competent at negotiating and able to rejecting initial frames when appropriate I'm not sure. If you are terrible at negotiating, or you think the other guys might be bad at it, then in both cases I guess saying the first number is safer. But be warned: if you say a high number and they suck at negotiating too much, they might just not hire you. Sometimes there is a number you can agree on but they ask you to come down to a number above their max and then even though you say "sure" they still have to come up with a reason to cancel the deal. This is dumb, but it happens.