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.
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.