[makeitsuckless]

How is that "ironic"? Contrary to all anti-government rhetoric, most government agencies are by their nature more transparant than the average startup.

However, it's easy to be transparant about salaries when you deal with collective bargaining and don't have to generate your own revenue.

Especially the latter means that what companies are willing to pay tends to depend on the financial circumstances at the moment of hiring, resulting in differences that cannot be justified by performance or value.

It takes costly rounds of corrections before you can be transparant about that without causing major upheaval when you reveal everyone's salaries. It only works for companies with short, relatively linear history. Everywhere else, salaries tend to diverge over time for many reasons.