This is a roundabout way of telling you that companies are not sensitive to small differences in employee wages because employees are so darned expensive anyhow.  You see $5,000 and think “Holy cow, even after taxes that’s a whole new vacation.  Five thousand dollars.  Five thousand dollars.  It would be so very, very greedy of me to ask for five thousand whole dollars.”  The HR department sees $5,000 and thinks “Meh, even after we kick in the extra taxes, that is only about 3% of their fully-loaded cost for this year anyhow, or seven hundredths of one percent of that team’s hiring budget.  I wonder if the cafeteria has carrot cake today?”

Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of his hiring budget: you get a new Macbook if you convince Bob to give you $5k extra, but Bob gets (if he is anomalously lucky) a dinner at TGIFridays if he convinces you to take $5k less.

The second implication is that the inner serf worrying “If I even attempt to negotiate this, the deal will fall through” is worrying for nothing.  They’ve got thousands invested in this discussion by this point.  They want you.  The absolute worst outcome of negotiating an offer in good faith is that you will get exactly the contents of that offer.  Let me say that again for emphasis: negotiating never makes (worthwhile) offers worse.  This means you need what political scientists call a commitment strategy: you always, as a matter of policy, negotiate all offers.

Ramit Sethi (more on him later) introduced me to a concept that he calls Competence Triggers: basically, if you have to judge someone’s skill based on a series of brief interactions, you’re going to pattern match their behavior against other people who you like.  When people with hiring authority think of winners, they think of people like them who live and breathe this business thing.  They negotiate things as a matter of course: that is a major portion of the value they bring to the company.  Volunteering a number when asked says the same thing to people with hiring authority that flunking FizzBuzz says to an engineer: this person may be a wonderful snowflake in other regards, but on the thing I care about, they’re catastrophically incompetent.  It will also cause them to retroactively question competencies they’d previously credited you with.

Ramit Sethi (more on him later) introduced me to a concept that he calls Competence Triggers: basically, if you have to judge someone’s skill based on a series of brief interactions, you’re going to pattern match their behavior against other people who you like.  When people with hiring authority think of winners, they think of people like them who live and breathe this business thing.  They negotiate things as a matter of course: that is a major portion of the value they bring to the company.  Volunteering a number when asked says the same thing to people with hiring authority that flunking FizzBuzz says to an engineer: this person may be a wonderful snowflake in other regards, but on the thing I care about, they’re catastrophically incompetent.  It will also cause them to retroactively question competencies they’d previously credited you with

The only thing better than “We” is “You” (and variants), because people care a heck of a lot more about their problems than about your problems.  (This advice is stolen shamelessly from Dale Carnegie.)

Anyhow, simply by bringing attention to something which was hopefully already in bold print on their resume, they just increased their perceived value to the company, thus justifying the company moving a lever which (again) the company isn’t really sensitive to at the end of the day.