If salaries are completely transparent, including external to the company, salary negotiation will all but disappear. You'll apply for a senior developer job, see that all the senior developers there make $95k (or whatever), and you're either okay with or you're not.
The flipside, which is largely why I am not in favor of legally enforced salary transparency, is that you ask for the salary range, they say $90-100k (or whatever), and you can justify why you should get 100 or 105 or 110 with examples. Or you can ask for $90k because you're happy with that and know you won't price yourself out of the position, or any number of other possibilities.
It just makes the entire process much less flexible, which I know a lot of us developers love, but in the business world it doesn't make much sense.
Salary transparency doesn’t require salary equality. Sure, if all Senior SWEs are making $95K, you just don’t apply there. In the more likely case, seniors are making a spread of $80-160K or $90-225K or whatever and you can decide where your likely value may land in or just outside that range.
>You'll apply for a senior developer job, see that all the senior developers there make $95k (or whatever), and you're either okay with or you're not.
But then one senior developer would claim that they are better or different than every other senior developer, and negotiation would return. Sure, Tim might be willing to accept the average rate of $95, but Jim worked as a staff engineer at Google, and so on.
That's not how it works out in real life. For example, in Congress all staffer salaries are open. There are still huge differences for the same position and people don't revolt over being paid less. They also don't jump ship when they find out.
The problem is that the information asymmetry implies that you might be worth 95k in the market, but you're much less likely to know that than the company making the offer, and accept 80k not realizing you've lost out on 15k. It gets further against you if they do things like asking your previous pay.
In general, you would expect salary negotiation to be worse for any given employee, because they have limited tools to research with compared to the hiring company, and far more limited (man) hours to do that research.
I would also imagine negotiation still exists, but now more emphasized on the extra benefits, eg PDOs, medical plans, bonuses, etc.
And ofc the added negative that the company can hide unfair practices, eg underpaying particular groups, or hiring someone's kid for 2x the pay, or whatever.
The main negative is that someone who was skilled at salary negotiations now makes less, but presumably most people aren't skilled, making it more a net positive. The biggest concern tbh is if the whole industry was overpaying its workers due to the fog of war, and this suddenly cleared things up, and employees across the board take a hit
Because in most cases there are some or even many people who are available to work for less. The management then would argue that "you can't earn more than they do for the same work, everyone would have to get a raise but there is no justification for that". Secrecy makes it an individual discussion as a by-product.
In either case, managers would not entertain talk about a raise unless there ware actually not that many people willing to do the same work for less. So a secret negotiation allows them to hide that information from the rest of the workers and only compensate those aware of their market worth. An open negotiation would not lower compensation for the latter since they can always just quit, it would raise salaries for the less informed.
We do have a couple examples of companies that are transparent with salaries or comp plans (Buffer, Gitlab, even places like Basecamp).
Nowhere with open published comp numbers has ever come close to my comp. Maybe it would work better as a system if everyone was opted in but the current data points I see don't support higher salaries for people with my skillset.
