[ssklash]

I think you're ignoring the massive power differential between employers and applicants. It's a game of incomplete information when the applicant doesn't know the possible salary range.

Your company might be benevolent, but it doubt most are, and when companies use information asymmetry to pay less, it hurts the very people they will turn around and pretend to care about, culture, "we're a family!", all the corporate platitudes we all know.

> At the end of the day, I really believe that the only person someone should compete against is himself.

This just isn't true. Should, in an ideal fantasy world, maybe. In the real, "I need to make money to eat and pay rent" world, you're competing with every other person applying for the same role. If you don't get a job, it's your life on the line. If a company misses out on a good applicant, well better luck next time, nothing really changes.

Bottom line, keeping pay bands secret/undisclosed only hurts individuals, and helps companies. Given the inherent power differential between the two, there's no good reason to tilt things even more in favor of employers.

[timr]

> I think you're ignoring the massive power differential between employers and applicants. It's a game of incomplete information when the applicant doesn't know the possible salary range.

This is repeated all over the thread, but makes little sense. You don't need to know this to come to agreement. All you need to know is what you want/expect to be paid, and the lowest number you're willing to accept. The company, in turn, doesn't know this information, and wants to discover it. You're equally matched. You both have exactly 50% of the information required to come to agreement.

Moreover, the company has invested a great deal of time and money to get you to the point in the negotiation where it actually matters what you're willing to accept. You have power!

The one thing that this does is (maybe) savesyou the effort of interviewing when your salary expectations are wildly out of line with the employer's willingness to pay. But that rarely happens, in practice. When it does happen, it's at senior levels, where your value to the company is disproportionately large. If you're at that level, you can usually tell going into the interview if the company has properly identified the value you believe you bring.

Stupid example: if you have 20 years of experience as a software engineering lead, manager, senior engineer, and so on, and you're interviewing for "Javascript Developer 1", then maybe you should be worried about pre-filtering on salary expectations.

[kyralis]

You're missing that the company has the same information from a pool of other existing employees or candidates, and you do not. The information is not 50%, because you're in the dark about the state of the market - you're highly likely to be leaving money on the table. It's similar to why insider trading is illegal: one party is playing with non-public information.

[timr]

No, I'm not missing that. First, you're not "dark" -- it's pretty easy to get a sense of what the market will pay. There are tons of resources. The average company is not getting better information than you are about regional salaries, which is all you really care about. If nothing else, you can find this information by just going out and negotiating a few times.

Second, the big companies will (sometimes) pay for salary data, but this information falls in the "what the company is willing to pay" bucket. Again, that's 50% of the information to make a deal, and you don't need to know it. From your perspective, it doesn't matter if they got their salary band by consulting a survey or a magic 8 ball. Maybe it affects the level of faux outrage they show when you ask for more, but then you're just back to negotiation.

Said differently, if you know you're worth $X, and the company believes that the statistical average human cog in Barnsville, Nebrahoma is worth $Y, what do you care why they believe that? Your job is to find the highest number between $X and $Y that they will accept, based on your unique value. Their job is to convince you to join, and maybe get that number closer to $Y. Their justification for $Y is not your concern.