The best thing you could do is to have two offers. In that case the companies bid for you on the perceived value you will provide them. And you turn the table. Btw - anecdotal evidence points that is a way to get a raise too - company Y is offering X,Z and C. Can you top it so I can stay here?

I would not recommend the raise strategy unless you have a very impersonal relationship with your manager OR you're 100% willing and able to walk (e.g. offer is in front of you and can be signed that day).

Managers are human beings too and don't like being put at gunpoint by their employees. It's very much the nuclear option IMO.

If I had good relationship with my manager, he would have offered a raise without me having to ask for it.

What is your leverage if you don't have competing offer?

Your willingness to quit.

What do you by inform your position? Can you give an example of what to look for?

Well, recruiters are in the unique position of getting to talk to tens (or sometimes hundreds) of candidates a week for any given position, and asking them all a bit about salary usually yields a workable model for the market for any given role.

Some recruiters also have access to data from VCs or from other salary reports (there are a number of good institutions that run compensation surveys - access to these usually costs lots of money). Glassdoor is also a good source of data (sometimes) and PayScale is even better.

Do recruiters ever provide this information to candidates for a fee? If I was in the market for a job it would be great to pay an experienced recruiter to objectively judge my skills and say how much I should ask.

Buy recruiters at your current company a beer. If you keep in contact, especially once they've left, you can get all sorts of information.

It is good advice to treat recruiters with respect. All too often on HN I see an attitude of contempt shown towards recruiters (and HR in general).

That contempt is earned from a history of doing things that make articles like this one necessary.

I agree, but there is nothing to be gained personally from doing so. It is like being rude or contemptuous to your waiter.

Why would they charge? They get a placement fee based on a percentage of the starting salary. It's in their interest that the candidate gets the best deal possible.

They get their fee if you are placed. This puts them in a conflict of interest situation where if they can convince you that you are worth less than your true price you will be easier to place. Also the cheaper you are the less work they will have to do to get you placed in a new position.

You really only want advice from someone you are paying and who cannot benefit from under pricing you.

Do you have any other good sources? As a marketing guy who wears a lot of hats, it is hard to identify consistent titles that represent what I bring to the table, and PayScale didn't seem to be great, and Glassdoor was hit or miss (in large part due to geographic data despite living in the Bay Area where they should have lots of data).

There is serious information asymmetry between recruiters/employers vs employees, and if information is the best weapon, employees are woefully unequipped to fight that battle.

Glassdoor is okay for the UK at least, I use it to check the Software Developer and Solutions Architecture average wages nearby to were I live. The amount of data seems to be getting worse lately though, wonder if certain companies are asking for data to be removed.

Glassdoor's website states "Your trust is our top concern, so companies can't alter or remove reviews." so at least the reviews are genuine but of course, that does not mean some other data (salaries) are not being altered.

Especially helpfull for engineers, the salaries and titles of H1B visa holders is public

This is actually a dangerous source to draw conclusions from. Even ignoring the qualitative bias of H1-B workers having less leverage than an average worker with easy mobility which likely causes relative wage depression in that data set, the key issue is that a significant chunk of a high salary software engineer is in equity and it rarely shows up in the labor certificate application. So H1-B data is mostly base salary and can be misleading to use when drawing a conclusion on total comp. Extra care need to be taken.

Both good points. All of the data mentioned has its role. The key with H1B data is that the biases are better known. With self reported datasets, who knows what the poster's motivation is? Especially with companies that don't have many data points!

The risk to an employee is asking for too little and H1B data can help put of floor on that number.