<prompt> Human: This happened several months ago when I attempted to negotiate compensation for my current job. Im bringing it up now to start a discussion, and to hopefully benefit those, including myself, who are currently or will soon be in the negotiation process. In hindsight, I think I did a pretty poor job as Ill outline here, but there was one conversation with the hiring manager in particular that really threw me off my game that I had a hard time recovering from. As a bit of background, at the time I was toiling away as an academic postdoc making 45k with a PhD and a decent amount of experience, and desperate to get out. To be clear, I wasnt going to walk away from any offer the company gave me, and had no other competing offers, so I didnt have much leverage going into it. The company of course didnt know this outright, but I was desperate to get out of my situation, I think the new company picked up on this, and this definitely affected the negotiation. As far as negotiations go, not a great position to start from. The interview process was fairly standard. This was with a small startup 10 people. The sequence of events was:- Phone screen with manager and senior team member. No talk of compensation.- Phone call with HR rep, who asked what salary range I was looking for. I had done a fair amount of research online and determined my market value was 85-95k. In spite of this I kinda panicked and gave a huge range of 70-100k. I think this was a mistake as I basically anchored myself to the lower number. Also because of aforementioned desperation I really did not want to price myself out of consideration, and therefore went so much lower than my actual desired range.- On site interview. went fine, no talk of compensation- Received offer by email for 70k very small amount of equity. Lower than expected or hoped for. Set up phone call to discuss offer with hiring manager. - Phone call with hiring manager HM. This is where I got thrown for a loop. I had my talking points ready. I asked if there was any wiggle room in salary; HM said that was what they came up with given my previous experience and qualifications. I mentioned that according to various salary aggregators online I found my market value based on experience, education level, and geography, to be 85-95k. HM came back with, well, those databases are not reliable, and people tend to inflate their salaries when they input them into those websites. I was so thrown off by this statement that I couldnt counter with anything but, oh.... However baseless HMs statement was, they instantly discredited my main argument, and I couldnt recover from it. How would you counter such a statement??So, long story short, I accepted the initial offer. Working here has been fine, great actually, but I still feel undervalued salary-wise, and wonder what I mightve done differently.  <response>: You sound like you are over analyzing this. Just keep gaining knowledge and look for a new job in 2-3 years. 