I built a 90-second SIM for the moment engineers freeze on salary

hey hn,

i kept watching friends take the first number a recruiter said out loud. not because they're bad at this, because nobody actually preps for these calls the way they'd hoped they would, when the recruiter goes "so what are you looking for?", you either say something too low, or you flip it back asking "what's the band?" and whatever they say basically becomes the ceiling anyway.

so i did some research and built a sim for that specific moment. hand-built decision tree. the optimal path borrows from fisher & ury (batna), galinsky (anchoring), and voss (the tactical pause thing).

first scenario is called "the lowball offer". you walk into a cafe. your friend/mentor kofi runs hiring at a series b. offer letter is face-down on the table. $95k base, market's around $130k. before you even flip it over, he asks: what's your walk-away number?

you dont have one. neither did you think of it

four scenes with four choices each, i'd genuinely love to know where the optimal path i designed lands wrong, because i'm sure it does somewhere.

there's a cmu stat that puts the lifetime cost of undernegiotiating at ~$500k. it's a stopper. left it out for now but happy to add it back if people think it earns its place.