Looking casually at jobs lately I would say that 80% of them have posted salary ranges. This has been enormously helpful in a) helping me avoid jobs with inflated titles but low pay and b) attracting me to jobs I might not otherwise consider because of very competitive pay.
Seems like a win-win in most cases.
Not very useful, that.
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 is no positive look from this.
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.
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.
So the data says it is useful
Extremely helpful. /s
How about job postings with relatively decent ranges like this backend engineer role in OpenAI: https://openai.com/careers/backend-engineer-evals-understand... with a range of $245,000 – $310,000?
It would be great if the law could say something like "range must be +/- %25 of the target salary" (Obviously that's very difficult...)
"range may have relative error of no more than 10%"?
where the relative error is the usual 2*(max-min)/(max+min)