I cannot imagine anyone, ever, being happy with being told "hey you're great but you only rolled a 4 on your salary negotiation so you're $15k out of pocket.
Sometimes you get a company that gets offended at the prospect of negotiation - that's a 1, although if you get an offer rescinded like that it's probably good for you in the long run.
Sometimes you throw out a ridiculous number for whatever reason and the other side says, "mmmm...yeah, okay." That's a 20. But it's not exactly uncommon to gain or lose 5+ figures because of a random person's random whims at a random time.
It can be hard to reconcile that with the notion of a meritocratic society, but cognitive dissonance is the spice of life.
An example of a large range in my head is like 120-140k, a more typical one would be like 120-130k. If you’re good, you could negotiate a bigger range.
That’s an appreciable difference to the employee, but basically a rounding error to the employer.
If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens.
> If you have a high salary today your employer already has an incentive to get rid of you and replace you with a new grad. It already happens.
This is a little different as the employer is making a trade off between employee experience and employee cost. Employers don't have an incentive to replace an employee with an equally skilled employee at the same market rate, but when the salary is randomly chosen out of a range, employers do have an incentive to replace high rollers with new employees who are statistically likely to roll something lower.
Yay the outcome of the negotiation, the lower part of your range is something you’d be happy with, and the upper is something you’d be quite happy with.
The employer meanwhile is offering you a range from what they’d like, to what they can tolerate.
Anything you get in the middle is satisfactory to both parties, with the added benefit that you didn’t have to beg for it and they didn’t have to cave for it.
Randomness allows for some absolution of responsibility.
If you’re shameless in salary negotiations (not a bad thing for you), this system puts you at a relative disadvantage. But the median person finds salary negotiations to be nerve wracking. I think this helps people closer to the median, by allowing them to negotiate a better position without feeling as guilty about it.