[JavaBatman]

There should be a legal requirement for companies to publicly post the salary band for every role. Otherwise, how do employees know where to start negotiations? This opaqueness only helps the employer, who already has much more leverage. Price assymetry goes against free market principles. The price of labor is like any other price of a good or service. People should know how much something costs before buying.

[PragmaticPulp]

Public institutions do this in a lot of places. Apply for a job at a state University or other state-run institution and depending on where you live you might be able to look up the exact salaries of everyone who works there, including your future boss and coworkers.

Sounds great, but it doesn't really work out in favor of higher salaries. It becomes too easy for hiring managers to say "that's the salary band, can't go any higher". A lot of people hate negotiating and accept it as-is. Compensation at these institutions tends to be lower than what you get elsewhere, not higher.

The real negotiation just gets moved to a different discussion: If you say you need $150K but the salary band for the job listing is $100-120K, you can try to get them to create a separate, new opening at the higher salary band. Or they might already have multiple job openings at different salary bands and they'll quickly switch you to the other opening in the system, which doesn't actually change much at all from the hiring perspective.

[mtmail]

The EU created a proposal "EU to mandate public salary information for all job postings [pdf]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30440211 so one day it may be required.

[itake]

I fully support this, but it needs to be beyond base salary. they should state base and total comp with all of the strings clearly attached.

A previous employer would pat themselves on the back for keeping tight comp bands and paying everyone fairly, but they didn't disclose how new highers received very different signup bonuses and RSU packages. So yes, looking by ethnicity/gender/age/etc, everyone had the same base, but they were definitely not paid equally.

[sailfast]

This is already law in Colorado. From what I’ve seen, however, folks are only required to post the base salary, not the whole band. Either way employers likely end up posting the widest band possible for all positions, so the data may not be super useful in terms of offers signed.

[bushbaba]

Ideally the total compensation band. For most tech jobs salary can be only 50% of total compensation.

[itake]

It should be both. Base is important for home purchases and 401k matching. TC is complicated b/c of all the strings.

[renewiltord]

Being open about our comp band only results in increasing the top of the funnel but they fail the first tech screen (which is a fairly simple problem - doesn’t require any data structures beyond a hash map and the algo could be figured out by a lay person). Decided to be more cagey so I could prefilter out people I won’t want to hire anyway. Better that way.

In my experience, the guys who make $700k are public with their expectations because they’re filtering out positions they’d be unhappy with.

That’s my lived experience. We do controlled experiments on a one month cycle to refine our hiring process.