Heh, how very true. I completed a round of interviews with a large, older, well-known company. The recruiter got me interested by saying they could match my current (well above market rates) salary. Through a total of 10 hours (over 4 days, including an on-site where they flew me out from the west coast to the gulf coast), the response was a solid "the team loves you, they love the work you've done, and they want you to do it here. Your salary requirement is no problem at all". When it came time for the actual offer, I got "Gosh, gee-whiz, so, apparently your asking salary is about $40k more than our most-senior team member for that group, we can't have such salary disparity among the team. Would you take a $40k pay-cut to come work for us?" I would've laughed, if I wasn't so annoyed. It came off like a classic bait-and-switch, but I could easily believe that an HR droid saw the deal when it was 80% of the way through the process and put the kibosh on it.