Probably not. Imagine if you signed a 15-month lease and prices skyrocketed, and your landlord tried to get you to pay more. You would rightfully tell them to pound sand. They will do the same to you.

Yeah, this also depends on the person. In grad school my friends all lived in one apartment complex and I lived in a cheaper apartment about a mile away. I’m vey shy and missed a lot of social opportunities because of that mile. I paid an extra $300 a month to move into the same apartment as one of my friends and it was worth every penny even though I was a broke grad student.

The reddit advice is correct that if you can get away with it, not stating a salary expectation and making the employer give the first number is likely to get you a higher salary. But of course the employer knows this too and wants to pay as little as possible, which is why they try to get you to give the first number. So it comes down to who has the most power in the negotiation. In most industries at most times, the employer has way more power than the employee and can just refuse to hire someone who won’t give a number because there are plenty of other candidates, as you discovered. But a disproportionate number of reddit users work in software engineering and related fields, and until recently employees in those fields had a lot of leverage when it comes to salary negotiations like this, which is probably where the advice comes from. Basically, this is good advice if you know there are lots of companies that would want to hire you, because it will maximize your salary at the risk of potentially shutting the door at one company. It’s not good advice if you really want to work at a particular company and aren’t trying to maximize your salary or expect to have few options.