Prequel to my previous post:

I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.

They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.

Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.

Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible

Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.

I received the following group of responses:

- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)

Here is what I did:

Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).

Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.

They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.

So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input.