I’m not ready for my current employer to know about this, so I’ve created a throwaway account to ask about it.
A week ago I interviewed with Google, and I just got the feedback: they’re very happy and want to move forward. They’ve sent me an email asking for various details, including my current salary.
Now it seems to me very much as if I don’t want to tell them my current salary—I suspect I’d do much better if they worked out what they felt I was worth to them and offered me that, rather than taking my current salary and adding a bit extra. The Internet is full of advice that you shouldn’t tell a prospective employer your current salary when they ask. But I’m suspicious of this advice—it seems like the sort of thing they would say whether it was true or not. What’s your guess—in real life, how offputting is it for an employer if a candidate refuses to disclose that kind of detail when you ask for it as part of your process? How likely are Google to be put off by it?
I work at Google. When I was interviewing, I was in the exact same position of suspecting I shouldn’t tell them my salary (which I knew was below market rate at the time). I read the same advice you did and had the same reservations about it. Here’s what happened: I tried to withhold my salary information. The HR person said she had to have it for the process to move forward and asked me not to worry about it. I tried to insist. She said she totally understood where I was coming from, but the system didn’t allow her flexibility on this point. I told her my salary, truthfully. I received an offer which was substantially greater than my salary and seemingly uncorrelated with it.
My optimistic reading of the situation is that Google’s offer is mostly based on approximate market salary for the role, adjusted perhaps by how well you did at the interviews, your seniority, etc. (these are my guesses, I don’t have any internal info on how offers are calculated by HR). Your current salary is needed due for future bookkeeping, statistics, or maybe in case it’s higher than what Google is prepared to offer and they want to decide if it’s worth it to up the offer a little bit. That’s my theory, but keep in mind that that it’s just a bunch of guesses, and also that it’s a big company and policies may be different in different countries and offices.
I think it is worth mentioning that “the system won’t allow for flexibility on this” is just about the oldest negotiation tactic in the book. (Along with, “let me check with my boss on that...”)
In reality, there is zero reason Google, or any employer, should need to know your current or past salary information apart from that information’s ability to work as a negotiation tactic in their favor.
Google has something you want (a job that pays $) and you have something they want (skill to make them $). Sharing your salary this early in the process tips the negotation scales (overwhelmingly) in their favor.
That said, Google is negotiating from a place of immense strength. They choose from nearly anyone they want, while there is only one Google...
...so, if Google wants to know your salary, tell them your salary. And enjoy your career at one of the coolest companies around. You win. :)
And if salary is what matters use them as resume-points to get a higher salary somewhere else.
There are some things you may want to consider when using this strategy. For example, choose the appropriate amount of time you want to spend at Google. Too short may be suspicious, but too long would be a lost purpose if your goal is to make more money somewhere else later.
Optimize for having the most impressive CV when you leave. This means you should have an impressively sounding job description. Think about your CV items “on project X I worked as Y and my responsibilities were Z”, and try to manage your career within Google to optimize these.
Have a plausible story about why you decided to work for Google, and why you later decided to work somewhere else. This story can also be made up later, but if you prepare it in advice, you can make it more realistic.
The most simple version of this advice would be: If you choose Google with hope of having an impressive CV and a higher salary later, don’t stay there for the next 10 years in a role of code monkey working all the time on some completely unknown project that will be cancelled shortly after you leave.
Interview with other companies (Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) and get other offers. When the competition is other prospective employers, your old salary won’t much matter.
In real life, the sort of places where employers take offense by you not disclosing current salary (or generally, by salary negotiations -that is, they’d hire someone else if he’s available more cheaply) are not the places you want to work with: if they’re putting selection pressure for downscaling salaries, all your future coworkers are going to be, well, cheap.
This is anecdotally not true for Google; they can afford truckloads, if they really want to have you onboard. So this is much more likely to come from standardized processes. Also note in Google’s case, that decisions are delegated to a board of stakeholders, so there isn’t really one person who can be put off due to salary (and they probably handle the hire/no hire decisions entirely separate to the salary negotiations).
if they’re putting selection pressure for downscaling salaries, all your future coworkers are going to be, well, cheap.
Also, the company will probably be less likely to buy you a decent computer for work, install a new server when your department needs it, or hire new people when there is more work than you can handle. Even if you somehow don’t care about money for yourself, you probably do at least care about having decent working conditions. Maybe the just-world hypothesis makes you believe that lower salary will somehow be balanced by better working conditions, but it’s probably the other way round.
I’m a manager at a financial firm and I’ve hired people. I’d consider it pretty normal not to want to say. “Everyone” knows that trying to get the other person to name a number first is a common negotiating tactic, no real grownup is going to take it personally or get upset about this.
I don’t know how “normal” a company Google is in this way, but I’d guess it’s pretty normal.
If you are challenged on this, you can try stating it as a rule: “I’m not prepared to discuss my current salary, I’m here to talk about working for Google.” Or, “As a policy I don’t disclose my current salary. I’m sure you understand.” Or make up some blah about how that’s proprietary information for your current employer and you don’t feel comfortable disclosing it.
If they absolutely refuse to process your application without this (which is a bad move on their part if they really want you, but some companies are stubborn that way), other options are to fudge your number upwards somehow, though personally I wouldn’t try the ones that actually involve telling a literal lie:
Give them a wide range of expectations instead of your current salary. Say that of course it depends on the other details of the offer, any other offers you might get, etc.
Roll in as much stuff as you plausibly can (adding in bonuses or other moneylike benefits, and making an adjustment if the cost of living in Googleland is higher than where you live now). Example: I could add my salary of $80k, my last year’s bonus of $5k (or next year’s bonus, or my average bonus in percentage terms, whichever is highest), and my $2k transit benefits for a total of $87k.
Round up to the nearest $10k and say it’s an approximate figure. So if I make $87k I might say I’m in the ballpark of $90k.
State a range (e.g. if I made $69k I might say I make something in the high 5 figures, or somewhere near the $70-80k range)
My guess is that a mild refusal would be acceptable to Google. They are unlikely to be put off by a change of subject.
A hard refusal might annoy them, if they persist in asking.
I suggest naming a very high figure first, to gain benefit from the anchoring effect. Then mentioning your salary will make it the anchor for the negotiation. Google has a reputation for paying high salaries.
This reminded me to ask about a similar question: I am currently interviewing. Assuming I get an in-person interview, that will involve a long flight. I feel like I shouldn’t tell my current employer that I’m interviewing until I have an offer, but in order to hide it I presumably will have to take holiday on fairly short notice, have a plausible reason for why I’m taking it, and generally act like I’m not taking a long flight to an interview. There’s a chance that I’ll have to do this multiple times. (Though ideally I’d take multiple in-person interviews in the same trip.)
I don’t particularly like the idea of doing this. It feels deceitful and stressful. How bad an idea would it be to just let my employer know what’s going on?
How bad an idea would it be to just let my employer know what’s going on?
Extremely bad. People have been fired or denied promotion because of this. Don’t even tell any of your colleagues.
I am not discussing the legal aspects of this, but you will probably be perceived as not worth investing in the long term. Imagine that your interview fails and you decide to stay. Your current employer is not going to trust you with anything important anymore, because they will be expecting you to leave soon anyway.
Okay, this may sound irrational, because you are not your employer’s slave, and technically you are (any anyone else is) free to leave sooner or later. But people still make estimates. It is in your best interest to pretend to be a loyal and motivated employee, until the day you are 100% ready to leave.
It feels deceitful
This is part of the human nature; what we have evolved to do. Even your dislike for deceit is part of the deceit mechanism. If you unilaterally decide to stop playing the game, it most likely means you lose.
There is probably an article by Robin Hanson about how LinkedIn helps us to get in contact with new job offers while maintaining plausible deniability, which is what makes it so popular, but I can’t find the link now.
I founded it by searching site:overcomingbias.com social network. The key was generalizing from the specific linkedin to “social network,” though I can’t say why I thought to do that.
It is only deceitful if you haven’t made a honest effort to improve your situation in your current company. It is as deceitful to stay silent and don’t give your employer a chance to increase your salary of your position.
It depends on the type of company of course. There are those that see you as an exchangable human resource where it may be appropriate to see the company as a slave owner who has to be hidden tghe truth of your escape from.
But there are companies where honesty about work situations is seen as interest in the company and critique used as feedback to improve the environment.
Salary negotiatons will be always tough though. Strictly comparing offers is the only reliable way to sell yourself. Everything else is falling prey to the salary negotiation tricks of the business world.
EDIT: I’m from Germany so my view my be country specific.
In this case, I don’t want to leave, just there are things that I want more than I want to stay. Not that it couldn’t be improved, but they probably can’t offer anything to change my mind.
But there are companies where honesty about work situations is seen as interest in the company and critique used as feedback to improve the environment.
If you are in such company, that’s great! Try to improve things; provide the feedback.
But don’t mention the fact that you are doing interviews with another company.
There is probably an article by Robin Hanson about how LinkedIn helps us to get in contact with new job offers while maintaining plausible deniability, which is what makes it so popular, but I can’t find the link now.
I can’t find it either. Nothing on OB, nothing in Google for ‘Linkedin “Robin Hanson”’ or sharpened to add ‘hypocrisy’. Sure it was Linkedin he was talking about?
Even your dislike for deceit is part of the deceit mechanism. If you unilaterally decide to stop playing the game, it most likely means you lose.
I think I ADBOC. It’s not like the “disliking to be deceitful” gene evolved to make its bearers lose the game.
Certainly there are risks to being honest, but there are also benefits. Admittedly, the most salient one to me right now is “I don’t want to treat my current employer poorly”, and I’m not sure that lying about going to interviews is actually significantly worse than merely not telling them about interviews.
It’s not like the “disliking to be deceitful” gene evolved to make its bearers lose the game.
For people who properly compartmentalize, it helps to win the game. By signalling dislike to deceit, they gain other people’s trust… and then at the right moment they do something deceitful and (if they are well-calibrated) most likely profit from it..
It’s the people in the valley of bad rationality who may lose the game when they realize all the consequences and connections, and try to tune their honesty up to eleven. (For example by telling their boss that they would be willing to quit the company if they had a better offer from somewhere else, and that they actually look at the available information about other companies.)
It depends a lot on your company, so I think your inside view will be better than our outside view. I told my employer when I went out to do a tryout with CFAR, and that went well. One reason I told my boss was that, if I were hired, I’d need to scramble to get all my projects annotated well enough to be able to pass of seamlessly, and I didn’t want her to be left in the lurch or to make any plans that hinged on having her quant around for the next month. (Hiring sometimes took a while at my old company).
My boss really appreciated my being forthright and it saved me a lot of tsuris. I think it also worked better because it was expected that people in my role (Research Associate) wouldn’t stick around forever.
Yes, not leaving my employer in the lurch is important to me, but I do feel like they expect me to be around for a while. I’m glad to hear of your positive experience.
Almost everyone finds an explicit refusal to answer offputting. Don’t do it. But that doesn’t mean that you should actually answer. Usually a good choice is to answer a different question, such as to make them an offer.
I don’t feel qualified to answer your question, though if I were to make a guess, I wouldn’t expect them to be put off by refusal. Assuming Google behaves at least somewhat rationally, they should at this point have an estimate of your value as an employee and it doesn’t seem like your current salary would provide much additional information on that.
So, the question is, to what extent Google behaves rationally. This ties to something that I always wonder whenever I read salary negotiation advice. What is the specific mechanism by which disclosing current salary can hurt you? Yes, anchoring, obviously. But who does it? Is the danger that the potential employer isn’t behaving rationally after all and will anchor to the current salary, lowering the upper bound on what they’re willing to offer? Or is the danger primarily that anchoring will undermine your confidence and willingness to demand more (and if you felt sufficiently entitled, it wouldn’t hurt you at all)?
Or is the danger primarily that anchoring will undermine your confidence and willingness to demand more (and if you felt sufficiently entitled, it wouldn’t hurt you at all)?
I would guess this one. It can make you ask less, with almost zero effort on the employer’s side; they don’t even have to read your answer. So the cost:benefit ratio of asking you this question is huge. And even if it doesn’t work on some people, it most likely does on average, so it can save a lot of money.
The mechanism that seems most important to me doesn’t really involve any sort of cognitive bias much. It goes like this. You are on (say) $50k/year. You are good enough that you’d be good value at $150/year, but you’d be willing to move if offered $60k/year, if that were all you could get. You apply for a new job and have to disclose your current salary to every prospective employer. So you get offers in (say) the $60k-80k range because everyone knows, or at least guesses, that that’s enough to tempt you and that no one else will be offering much more. You might get a lot more if you successfully start a bidding war, but otherwise you’re going to end up paid way less than you could be.
Note that everyone in this scenario acts rationally, arguably at least. Your prospective employer offers you (say) $75k. This would be irrational if you’d turn that down but accept a higher offer. But actually you’ll take it. This would be irrational if you could get more elsewhere. But actually you can’t because no one else will offer you much more than your current salary.
(You could try telling them that you have a strict policy of not taking offers that are way below what you think you’re worth, in the hope that it’ll stop them thinking you’d accept an offer of $75k. But you might not like the inference they’d draw from that and your current salary.)
Obvious note: Of course people care about lots of other things besides money, your value to one employer isn’t the same as your value to another, etc. This has only limited effect on the considerations above.
I was recently in a similar position, but I nonetheless managed to negotiate a large salary increase by taking a job in a different city, quoting the salary level that I wanted, and pleading cost-of-living increases when I was asked to justify it. They did negotiate me down by about $5000, and I wouldn’t say I’m quite at market rates yet for my level of experience, but it did seem to successfully anchor the negotiations on my asking price rather than my previous salary.
The new city actually did have a higher cost of living than the old one, but I get the impression that the hiring manager didn’t care about the actual rate so much as he cared about having a rationale that looked good on paper.
Well, assuming your example numbers, if my work would bring $150k+$x/year and the company didn’t hire me because I refused to take $60k/year, instead demanding, say, $120k/year (over twice the current salary, how greedy), then they just let $30k+$something/year walk out the door. Would they really do that (assuming rational behavior blah blah)?
I don’t see how they would benefit from playing the game of salary-negotiating chicken to the bitter end. Having a reputation for not offering market salaries for people with unfortunate work history? That actually sounds like it could be harmful.
The company doesn’t really know your true value. If you are really worth $150k it raises the question why you can’t get your present employeer to pay you that wage. Your present employeer has a lot more information about your skills then they do.
I’m not ready for my current employer to know about this, so I’ve created a throwaway account to ask about it.
A week ago I interviewed with Google, and I just got the feedback: they’re very happy and want to move forward. They’ve sent me an email asking for various details, including my current salary.
Now it seems to me very much as if I don’t want to tell them my current salary—I suspect I’d do much better if they worked out what they felt I was worth to them and offered me that, rather than taking my current salary and adding a bit extra. The Internet is full of advice that you shouldn’t tell a prospective employer your current salary when they ask. But I’m suspicious of this advice—it seems like the sort of thing they would say whether it was true or not. What’s your guess—in real life, how offputting is it for an employer if a candidate refuses to disclose that kind of detail when you ask for it as part of your process? How likely are Google to be put off by it?
I work at Google. When I was interviewing, I was in the exact same position of suspecting I shouldn’t tell them my salary (which I knew was below market rate at the time). I read the same advice you did and had the same reservations about it. Here’s what happened: I tried to withhold my salary information. The HR person said she had to have it for the process to move forward and asked me not to worry about it. I tried to insist. She said she totally understood where I was coming from, but the system didn’t allow her flexibility on this point. I told her my salary, truthfully. I received an offer which was substantially greater than my salary and seemingly uncorrelated with it.
My optimistic reading of the situation is that Google’s offer is mostly based on approximate market salary for the role, adjusted perhaps by how well you did at the interviews, your seniority, etc. (these are my guesses, I don’t have any internal info on how offers are calculated by HR). Your current salary is needed due for future bookkeeping, statistics, or maybe in case it’s higher than what Google is prepared to offer and they want to decide if it’s worth it to up the offer a little bit. That’s my theory, but keep in mind that that it’s just a bunch of guesses, and also that it’s a big company and policies may be different in different countries and offices.
I think it is worth mentioning that “the system won’t allow for flexibility on this” is just about the oldest negotiation tactic in the book. (Along with, “let me check with my boss on that...”)
In reality, there is zero reason Google, or any employer, should need to know your current or past salary information apart from that information’s ability to work as a negotiation tactic in their favor.
Google has something you want (a job that pays $) and you have something they want (skill to make them $). Sharing your salary this early in the process tips the negotation scales (overwhelmingly) in their favor.
That said, Google is negotiating from a place of immense strength. They choose from nearly anyone they want, while there is only one Google...
...so, if Google wants to know your salary, tell them your salary. And enjoy your career at one of the coolest companies around. You win. :)
And if salary is what matters use them as resume-points to get a higher salary somewhere else.
There are some things you may want to consider when using this strategy. For example, choose the appropriate amount of time you want to spend at Google. Too short may be suspicious, but too long would be a lost purpose if your goal is to make more money somewhere else later.
Optimize for having the most impressive CV when you leave. This means you should have an impressively sounding job description. Think about your CV items “on project X I worked as Y and my responsibilities were Z”, and try to manage your career within Google to optimize these.
Have a plausible story about why you decided to work for Google, and why you later decided to work somewhere else. This story can also be made up later, but if you prepare it in advice, you can make it more realistic.
The most simple version of this advice would be: If you choose Google with hope of having an impressive CV and a higher salary later, don’t stay there for the next 10 years in a role of code monkey working all the time on some completely unknown project that will be cancelled shortly after you leave.
Sidestepping the question:
Interview with other companies (Microsoft, Facebook, etc.) and get other offers. When the competition is other prospective employers, your old salary won’t much matter.
The rationale behind salary negotiations are best expanded upon by patio11′s “Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued” (that article’s well worth the rent).
In real life, the sort of places where employers take offense by you not disclosing current salary (or generally, by salary negotiations -that is, they’d hire someone else if he’s available more cheaply) are not the places you want to work with: if they’re putting selection pressure for downscaling salaries, all your future coworkers are going to be, well, cheap.
This is anecdotally not true for Google; they can afford truckloads, if they really want to have you onboard. So this is much more likely to come from standardized processes. Also note in Google’s case, that decisions are delegated to a board of stakeholders, so there isn’t really one person who can be put off due to salary (and they probably handle the hire/no hire decisions entirely separate to the salary negotiations).
Also, the company will probably be less likely to buy you a decent computer for work, install a new server when your department needs it, or hire new people when there is more work than you can handle. Even if you somehow don’t care about money for yourself, you probably do at least care about having decent working conditions. Maybe the just-world hypothesis makes you believe that lower salary will somehow be balanced by better working conditions, but it’s probably the other way round.
I’m a manager at a financial firm and I’ve hired people. I’d consider it pretty normal not to want to say. “Everyone” knows that trying to get the other person to name a number first is a common negotiating tactic, no real grownup is going to take it personally or get upset about this.
I don’t know how “normal” a company Google is in this way, but I’d guess it’s pretty normal.
If you are challenged on this, you can try stating it as a rule: “I’m not prepared to discuss my current salary, I’m here to talk about working for Google.” Or, “As a policy I don’t disclose my current salary. I’m sure you understand.” Or make up some blah about how that’s proprietary information for your current employer and you don’t feel comfortable disclosing it.
If they absolutely refuse to process your application without this (which is a bad move on their part if they really want you, but some companies are stubborn that way), other options are to fudge your number upwards somehow, though personally I wouldn’t try the ones that actually involve telling a literal lie:
Give them a wide range of expectations instead of your current salary. Say that of course it depends on the other details of the offer, any other offers you might get, etc.
Roll in as much stuff as you plausibly can (adding in bonuses or other moneylike benefits, and making an adjustment if the cost of living in Googleland is higher than where you live now). Example: I could add my salary of $80k, my last year’s bonus of $5k (or next year’s bonus, or my average bonus in percentage terms, whichever is highest), and my $2k transit benefits for a total of $87k.
Round up to the nearest $10k and say it’s an approximate figure. So if I make $87k I might say I’m in the ballpark of $90k.
State a range (e.g. if I made $69k I might say I make something in the high 5 figures, or somewhere near the $70-80k range)
Lie outright, but plausibly.
My guess is that a mild refusal would be acceptable to Google. They are unlikely to be put off by a change of subject.
A hard refusal might annoy them, if they persist in asking.
I suggest naming a very high figure first, to gain benefit from the anchoring effect. Then mentioning your salary will make it the anchor for the negotiation. Google has a reputation for paying high salaries.
If you are looking for advice on negotiation, I suggest searching for ‘anchoring’ as well as ’negotiation, to get more evidence-based advice.
Good luck.
If it’s helpful to know what other Google employees make my compensation details are here.
This reminded me to ask about a similar question: I am currently interviewing. Assuming I get an in-person interview, that will involve a long flight. I feel like I shouldn’t tell my current employer that I’m interviewing until I have an offer, but in order to hide it I presumably will have to take holiday on fairly short notice, have a plausible reason for why I’m taking it, and generally act like I’m not taking a long flight to an interview. There’s a chance that I’ll have to do this multiple times. (Though ideally I’d take multiple in-person interviews in the same trip.)
I don’t particularly like the idea of doing this. It feels deceitful and stressful. How bad an idea would it be to just let my employer know what’s going on?
Extremely bad. People have been fired or denied promotion because of this. Don’t even tell any of your colleagues.
I am not discussing the legal aspects of this, but you will probably be perceived as not worth investing in the long term. Imagine that your interview fails and you decide to stay. Your current employer is not going to trust you with anything important anymore, because they will be expecting you to leave soon anyway.
Okay, this may sound irrational, because you are not your employer’s slave, and technically you are (any anyone else is) free to leave sooner or later. But people still make estimates. It is in your best interest to pretend to be a loyal and motivated employee, until the day you are 100% ready to leave.
This is part of the human nature; what we have evolved to do. Even your dislike for deceit is part of the deceit mechanism. If you unilaterally decide to stop playing the game, it most likely means you lose.
There is probably an article by Robin Hanson about how LinkedIn helps us to get in contact with new job offers while maintaining plausible deniability, which is what makes it so popular, but I can’t find the link now.
Here is the post by Robin Hanson.
I founded it by searching site:overcomingbias.com social network. The key was generalizing from the specific linkedin to “social network,” though I can’t say why I thought to do that.
Thank you! This was probably the one I remembered.
It is only deceitful if you haven’t made a honest effort to improve your situation in your current company. It is as deceitful to stay silent and don’t give your employer a chance to increase your salary of your position.
It depends on the type of company of course. There are those that see you as an exchangable human resource where it may be appropriate to see the company as a slave owner who has to be hidden tghe truth of your escape from.
But there are companies where honesty about work situations is seen as interest in the company and critique used as feedback to improve the environment.
Salary negotiatons will be always tough though. Strictly comparing offers is the only reliable way to sell yourself. Everything else is falling prey to the salary negotiation tricks of the business world.
EDIT: I’m from Germany so my view my be country specific.
In this case, I don’t want to leave, just there are things that I want more than I want to stay. Not that it couldn’t be improved, but they probably can’t offer anything to change my mind.
If you are in such company, that’s great! Try to improve things; provide the feedback.
But don’t mention the fact that you are doing interviews with another company.
I can’t find it either. Nothing on OB, nothing in Google for ‘Linkedin “Robin Hanson”’ or sharpened to add ‘hypocrisy’. Sure it was Linkedin he was talking about?
I think I ADBOC. It’s not like the “disliking to be deceitful” gene evolved to make its bearers lose the game.
Certainly there are risks to being honest, but there are also benefits. Admittedly, the most salient one to me right now is “I don’t want to treat my current employer poorly”, and I’m not sure that lying about going to interviews is actually significantly worse than merely not telling them about interviews.
For people who properly compartmentalize, it helps to win the game. By signalling dislike to deceit, they gain other people’s trust… and then at the right moment they do something deceitful and (if they are well-calibrated) most likely profit from it..
It’s the people in the valley of bad rationality who may lose the game when they realize all the consequences and connections, and try to tune their honesty up to eleven. (For example by telling their boss that they would be willing to quit the company if they had a better offer from somewhere else, and that they actually look at the available information about other companies.)
Disliking deception also makes people more cautious and frugal about it, which is probably beneficial too.
It depends a lot on your company, so I think your inside view will be better than our outside view. I told my employer when I went out to do a tryout with CFAR, and that went well. One reason I told my boss was that, if I were hired, I’d need to scramble to get all my projects annotated well enough to be able to pass of seamlessly, and I didn’t want her to be left in the lurch or to make any plans that hinged on having her quant around for the next month. (Hiring sometimes took a while at my old company).
My boss really appreciated my being forthright and it saved me a lot of tsuris. I think it also worked better because it was expected that people in my role (Research Associate) wouldn’t stick around forever.
Yes, not leaving my employer in the lurch is important to me, but I do feel like they expect me to be around for a while. I’m glad to hear of your positive experience.
Almost everyone finds an explicit refusal to answer offputting. Don’t do it. But that doesn’t mean that you should actually answer. Usually a good choice is to answer a different question, such as to make them an offer.
I would advise googling to find average salaries for similar positions, especially with google.
I don’t feel qualified to answer your question, though if I were to make a guess, I wouldn’t expect them to be put off by refusal. Assuming Google behaves at least somewhat rationally, they should at this point have an estimate of your value as an employee and it doesn’t seem like your current salary would provide much additional information on that.
So, the question is, to what extent Google behaves rationally. This ties to something that I always wonder whenever I read salary negotiation advice. What is the specific mechanism by which disclosing current salary can hurt you? Yes, anchoring, obviously. But who does it? Is the danger that the potential employer isn’t behaving rationally after all and will anchor to the current salary, lowering the upper bound on what they’re willing to offer? Or is the danger primarily that anchoring will undermine your confidence and willingness to demand more (and if you felt sufficiently entitled, it wouldn’t hurt you at all)?
I would guess this one. It can make you ask less, with almost zero effort on the employer’s side; they don’t even have to read your answer. So the cost:benefit ratio of asking you this question is huge. And even if it doesn’t work on some people, it most likely does on average, so it can save a lot of money.
The mechanism that seems most important to me doesn’t really involve any sort of cognitive bias much. It goes like this. You are on (say) $50k/year. You are good enough that you’d be good value at $150/year, but you’d be willing to move if offered $60k/year, if that were all you could get. You apply for a new job and have to disclose your current salary to every prospective employer. So you get offers in (say) the $60k-80k range because everyone knows, or at least guesses, that that’s enough to tempt you and that no one else will be offering much more. You might get a lot more if you successfully start a bidding war, but otherwise you’re going to end up paid way less than you could be.
Note that everyone in this scenario acts rationally, arguably at least. Your prospective employer offers you (say) $75k. This would be irrational if you’d turn that down but accept a higher offer. But actually you’ll take it. This would be irrational if you could get more elsewhere. But actually you can’t because no one else will offer you much more than your current salary.
(You could try telling them that you have a strict policy of not taking offers that are way below what you think you’re worth, in the hope that it’ll stop them thinking you’d accept an offer of $75k. But you might not like the inference they’d draw from that and your current salary.)
Obvious note: Of course people care about lots of other things besides money, your value to one employer isn’t the same as your value to another, etc. This has only limited effect on the considerations above.
I was recently in a similar position, but I nonetheless managed to negotiate a large salary increase by taking a job in a different city, quoting the salary level that I wanted, and pleading cost-of-living increases when I was asked to justify it. They did negotiate me down by about $5000, and I wouldn’t say I’m quite at market rates yet for my level of experience, but it did seem to successfully anchor the negotiations on my asking price rather than my previous salary.
The new city actually did have a higher cost of living than the old one, but I get the impression that the hiring manager didn’t care about the actual rate so much as he cared about having a rationale that looked good on paper.
Well, assuming your example numbers, if my work would bring $150k+$x/year and the company didn’t hire me because I refused to take $60k/year, instead demanding, say, $120k/year (over twice the current salary, how greedy), then they just let $30k+$something/year walk out the door. Would they really do that (assuming rational behavior blah blah)?
I don’t see how they would benefit from playing the game of salary-negotiating chicken to the bitter end. Having a reputation for not offering market salaries for people with unfortunate work history? That actually sounds like it could be harmful.
The company doesn’t really know your true value. If you are really worth $150k it raises the question why you can’t get your present employeer to pay you that wage. Your present employeer has a lot more information about your skills then they do.