I've done research into comparing concrete offers vs. the salary ranges specified in their job postings: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SfaV1p_jbgoTOyCsD5wd.... More often than not, the offer is very very close to the midpoint of the salary range. Most employers are thinking similarly: They have a wide range, but expect to pay somewhere in the middle for most candidates.
This law wasn't written to help highly paid SWEs get an extra $10k/year. It's written for lower-wage workers who can't get multiple offers and need to avoid entering long hiring pipelines for jobs that don't pay enough to cover rent.
> Likely the requirements listed will be inaccurate as well.
Where are the requirements actually accurate?
For what it's worth, the actual written requirements for many tech jobs are very questionable. In many cases, there's a big disconnect between the people writing the job ads and the people who actually communicate what they want.
And out of sheer laziness or lack of knowledge, there are plenty of recruiters that do things like post JavaScript jobs as Java jobs, as one example I've seen.
True, but that is also telling you something useful about the company.
I'm not defending it, I'm pointing out, that when a company tells you this is how they want to be seen by potentially new recruits then listen to them.
It is a red flag for one of two reasons:
- It is intentionally misleading (i.e. top of range is pure fiction).
- Upward mobility is so terrible, that they comingle multiple different tiers of expertise into the same job title.
There are companies that actually can hire in this fashion, Google was and then perhaps pretended to be such a company.
One could break it up into separate jobs for the different levels but that's also misleading if you are considering 3 PhD experts and 2 mid-level or 7 juniors and 3 seniors, etc.
In theory its not all that bad when such a post is true, in that it means an individual contributor role might be higher than anywhere else in the industry.
So the data says it is useful