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Yes, with a 50k salary, after renting a tiny apartment in Toronto, they would be left with just over $1200. Which is pretty much just enough to feed yourself.

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.

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.

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.