This might not be the case in the silicon valley, but here in Europe I find companies consistently try to offer as little as they can get away with, no matter the position. If you want a salary you think you deserve, you have to ask and be very determined about it. The same can be said of raises, I was massively disappointed to find out effort and hard work has nothing to do with getting a raise, but the truth is many employers are very happy to pay you as little as they can for as long as they can, specially if you are good.

Isn't the answer to that question always going to be that you were offered what you were offered because that was the least amount they thought you might accept?

That is, nobody pays you what you're worth to them. If they did, their profit from hiring you would be zero. Therefore, they pay you the least amount they can get you to accept.

> Isn't the answer to that question always going to be that you were offered what you were offered because that was the least amount they thought you might accept?

That would be an answer, albeit a very vacuous one.

From a game-theoretic perspective, you want the most they are willing to pay and they want the least you are willing to accept. But those two values delineate a range, sometimes a pretty big one, and what's really interesting here is where the final number falls in that range.

In real life, the game of negotiation does not have perfect information, which means you can fool the opposing party as to what the endpoints of that range are. That's the main way of pushing the final landing point closer to where you want it.

So there's a lot more to questions like this than these vacuous answers. It's a psychological game, and if their offer was actually the minimum you were willing to accept, you have to ask what else you could have done, either now or in the past, to set yourself up in a position where you could have "tricked" them into paying more than you were willing to accept.

I coach clients to pay not just what it will take to hire talent, but also what it will take to retain talent. This is a key difference particularly when talking about hiring unemployed candidates that may be inclined to accept less than market rate, or when considering candidates that are obviously underpaid by a significant amount. Market rate isn't an exact science but knowing what competitors offer candidates (generally speaking) is useful information that recruiters could potentially provide.

> So there's a lot more to questions like this than these vacuous answers. It's a psychological game, and if their offer was actually the minimum you were willing to accept, you have to ask what else you could have done, either now or in the past, to set yourself up in a position where you could have "tricked" them into paying more than you were willing to accept.

Yes, and that's what I meant when I originally wrote, "So why did you say yes? Pondering that question will reveal a lot about yourself and what you value, and it will also suggest what you should do if you're not happy with your current situation."

The point is that once you say yes, that's what you get. So think about why you said yes to a "low" offer. Was it because you didn't know it was a low offer? Then do some homework; get to know the market better. Was it because you did know it was a low offer but didn't know how to work up to a higher one? Then brush up on your negotiating skills or get an agent to represent you. Was it because you're not good at presenting yourself and have learned to live with lower offers? Then get some coaching or talk to a mentor.

Do you understand what I mean now? If you said yes to a "low" offer, it was only because you had reason to believe you couldn't do better. So identify that reason and do something about it.