The main thing I want from job descriptions is a salary range. The fact that companies don't post salaries is a strong counter-point to how companies complain about how hard it is to hire software engineers.
That is a pretty basic piece of info that companies like to exclude. They tend to just post "competitive salary" when in fact a lot of the ones that state that pay well below market.
But it is competitive. It's a competition to pay the least amount possible for the best employee possible. Hopefully a competition against other potential employers, not against the employee, but it's really a bit of both since salaries are a negotiated thing.
I think the post makes some good points. Fluff and buzzword skill lists are useful for entry-level positions, so that a potential candidate who wants to get into a new career and knows little about it has at least some idea of what to look up. But for higher-level positions, the things that candidates want to know about the company and the things that the company wants to know about the candidate, are a bit different, and they both know more about the industry/career path. So fluff and buzzword skill lists are as ineffective in a job description as in a resume.
I remember a company I had a contract with sometimes (not always) posted jobs and advertised a pretty high salary. These salaries were actually competitive and not just in line with the competition. You can't imagine how easy it is to find high quality people that way. Go figure...
In Norway, positions from public departments like the tax department usually includes salary range in the job description. They often pay very well too, while at the same time they have a very good description of what expertize they need. In fact most developers here in Norway should read those job descriptions, take notes and be ready fight for better salary for their next job interview.
The tax department here in Norway pays between 80k-130k annually for senior software developers. While earlier this year I got a 55k offer from a private company. I so wanted to show them the job listing from the tax department, but I just said thanks for the interview, but no thanks.
The hard thing about salary ranges is that there are multiple levels of an engineer, some of which can't always be factually expressed in terms of work experience or any other variable. Although, a great deal of companies claim to hire the best, in most cases, this is not the case. It's always a mixbag of "Ok-hires", "Brilliant-hires" and "Ok-hires-who-turned-to-be-brilliant".
Taking in account of all three, the salary ranges can be too broad. Yeah, Buffer and StackExchange are doing good but then again, quite a lot of times they have been said to be giving low salaries which also is compensated by the fact that they are super-remote-friendly.
I can't imagine if it'd work for every organisation though.
That does seem to be a very critical piece that is missing. Not that engineers say what they are selling themselves for in their applications either...
Why should they, though? When selling non-trivial product or service, and it's pretty safe to assume an engineer's time is not at all trivial, a good rule of thumb is to not reveal your price until the reasons to purchase are well understood and agreed upon.
What's worse in when they post a salary range but then go through the whole "what are your salary expectations" thing. Half the time the posted salary was all that interested me but I can't say that because I can't remember what it was listed as.