I am a bit confused by not talking about the salary right away, I have seen advice like yours and in this article about not giving the number fisrt but the opposite in other articles saying to leverage the anchoring bias by giving a high number first. That would help raising the following offers. Both approaches seem to make sense so I am not sure what to choose.
I think it's fair to give it first if you're a Senior engineer and are able to receive offers quickly.
If you were looking for a $150k salary, you could drop an extreme anchor at $200k and they might even give you $180k.
I’m also ambivalent because you risk investing in a time consuming interview process only to find out they’re offering .5 of what you deemed the minimum you’d take.
are you a vc level with visibility of salaries in all the company orgs? if not, just stay silent or you will undercut yourself. working class never knows their value, by design.
You can get a lot of data points online though from levelsfyi or blind.
that shows you how cheap people are working for, not how much you are worth to the company. as i said, better not to say any number