Pricing yourself out of a job with an organization that uses salary as an first-line filter is maybe not the worst thing in the world.
There are a lot of bad jobs in the world, you should be happy to turn down or be turned down by many jobs that you apply to. It's kind of a sad cultural trope that the employee is desperate for a 'yes' at every job they apply for, when that is often not true at all.
Unconventional opinion on this Valley bubble circuit, I'm sure, but I think you need to be mindful of what kind of business you're applying to.
Yes, salary is a filter, because money isn't infinite and the hiring budget is only so much. Yes, a certain category of hyped-up, massively funded startup may (temporarily) exist in an alternate universe where the laws of economics don't apply and all budgets are imaginary ("for the right people..."), but the rest of the universe doesn't work like that.
For example, a small company bootstrapped by the founder's limited personal funds simply isn't going to offer $250k pay packages to Full Stack JavaScript Rock Star Ninjas. In some cases, that's close to the entire gross revenue of the company. Yet there may be advantages to working for a company like that.
Likewise, large orgs and state agencies function in normal-law economics, not RockStar VC economics. There's only so much they can afford to pay, and that's that.
Negotiations aren't just a staring contest where, if you do the right things, you get paid like a banker, otherwise you toil in the lowly ranks of the unwashed proletariat. In theory, negotiation leads to compromise. Yes, employers have more leverage in these conversations often, but it doesn't change the fact that negotiation requires credible and bona fide compromise intentions from both sides.
Take the time to understand the nature of the business to which you are applying. Yeah, you might just be getting squeezed by MBA frat boys sitting on top of tens of millions in VC who are going to get rich off the sweat of your toil for peanuts, but in 90% of the country, that probably shouldn't be your first thought.
> Pricing yourself out of a job with an organization that uses salary as an first-line filter is maybe not the worst thing in the world.
"They try to filter people by salary" is not at the top of my list of reasons for why I wouldn't want to work somewhere. It's a reason, but it is dwarfed by many other ones.
I don't mean to imply that it's a primary filter of mine either, or even something I would attempt to find out to base my decision on. However, if a company makes a decision that we aren't compatible early on, they're probably right, for both of our benefit. That holds even more true the dumber the reason is.
It's an absurd example, but let's say you don't get hired because the hiring manager thinks your shirt is super ugly. That's insane and obviously completely improper and irrelevant -- but you're probably better off not getting that job!
There's an awful lot that's hiding under that word "often" in your last sentence. How often? How do we know?
Anecdotally, even as a software & full-stack web developer that's worked in half a dozen languages and has a math degree, I've been in both positions -- I've had the freedom to complain about people annoying me with unsolicited offers to interview while banking a third of my paycheck and treating another third as disposable... and I've been pavement-pounding in desperation.
The former has been more often the case than the latter for me, but I think it's probable that like a large portion of the audience here, I've been insulated by circumstance.
There are a lot of bad jobs in the world, you should be happy to turn down or be turned down by many jobs that you apply to. It's kind of a sad cultural trope that the employee is desperate for a 'yes' at every job they apply for, when that is often not true at all.