I agree it pretty much never hurts to ask for more salary. Outside of situations where the two sides were clearly so far apart that there was no satisfactory outcome (like spreads of more than 75K+ from the offer and the candidate's expectations), I've never seen it tank an offer in any way - the worst that can happen is that the company stays firm.
I will say I've been the manager at places that had a no-negotiation policy, and there were legitimate reasons for it. In our case, we wanted our policy towards salaries to be opaque, fair, and equitable, and it's hard to do that in an environment where everything is negotiated. We had strict salaries assigned per level, routinely adjusted to market (for existing employees as well as new ones). We had a few cases where this created some friction with people who assumed that any situation where a company refuses to negotiate necessarily means that a company is trying to screw you over, and that's not always the case.
Did no negotiation also apply to senior leadership compensation? I'm skeptical about those policies, since they never seem to apply to the people on top.
This was just for one department (eng) but it applied to the entire department, all the way up to leadership. This was at a smallish startup (~25 developers), I could definitely see how this might be harder to maintain at a bigger company when you get into very senior leadership.
Obviously in practice the more senior you were, the more influence you had over what the bands were, so in that sense I suppose the very top had some degree of negotiating power, but it was all still opaque and public, and the entire department knew what everyone in the department was making.
Buddy of mine that was hiring for a team put it this way:
HR determines the upper and lower range of the salary for positions. It’s actually in your boss’ best interest that you’re brought on at the highest in that range so that you’re the happiest you can be in the role.
So you’re really just negotiating with a third party (HR) that you’ll never talk to again in your day to day.
Maybe someone else can speak to HR incentives though. Are they incentivized to low ball you? Not sure. Either way, it’s just business.
In many companies, the boss actually has a yearly budget that he spends on his people's salaries as well as other costs. So, the less he pays you, the more money he has left for other needs. BTW I'm curious if FAANGs are arranged in this way as well, does anyone know?
I will say I've been the manager at places that had a no-negotiation policy, and there were legitimate reasons for it. In our case, we wanted our policy towards salaries to be opaque, fair, and equitable, and it's hard to do that in an environment where everything is negotiated. We had strict salaries assigned per level, routinely adjusted to market (for existing employees as well as new ones). We had a few cases where this created some friction with people who assumed that any situation where a company refuses to negotiate necessarily means that a company is trying to screw you over, and that's not always the case.