The one question that always catches me on job applications is summed up in two words: DESIRED SALARY.
“Whatever Tom Cruise got paid for making Vanilla Sky,” seems a reasonable number, especially when you consider relative benefit to mankind over the course of a career, but that’s not what companies are looking for.
What it is is a special pricing game, called “Guess what number I’ve got in my budget.” If you can hit that number exactly, you win—you get your job, at the maximum possible salary. Any lower, and you’ve screwed yourself out of some money, and if you go even a cent higher, they’ll normally turn you down outright.
I played a round of this today, and I can safely tell you that $60/hour for engineering consulting work, while a lowball estimate given what companies I’ve worked for have paid for similar services, is WAY TOO HIGH.
So. Still looking.
