[Sodman]

Having multiple offers on the table certainly helps - but I feel a lot of people know what they're looking for in terms of comp range when they're going into the interview process. Recruiters will usually ask you up-front what your target comp range is before even submitting your resume to a company. At engineer salary levels in the US, +/- $5-10k isn't going to be a life changing amount of money (especially after taxes), and is likely within the realms of negotiations anyway. The main reason for big jumps in comp are if you're applying to vastly different types of companies with wide levels of stock options on the table, eg FANG vs seed-stage startup.

[tmpz22]

Conversely a lot of companies don't list their range and a lot of recruiters, hiring managers, and other groups, won't list an accurate range especially in "newer" roles like devops engineering, ml-ops, security roles, semi-management roles, etc. I've seen anywhere from $80k-$180k offered for the same role disclosed randomly throughout the hiring process - sometimes its listed on a job board, sometimes you won't know until the offer letter.

[jjav]

It's hard to get a fixed answer because there is no fixed answer. Only government jobs have a strict predefined salary, private industry everything is negotiable.

The role may be advertised at a certain level but most of the time there is flexibility in going up or down a level based on candidate experience and how badly you make them want you. So 80K-180K can be a perfectly feasible range for the same job posting.