I think one reason why this is difficult for companies that are hiring software engineers, is that they can hire at multiple levels of experience. They just need good developers! A company that needs, say, a Golang developer, or Scala, or React, might be willing to hire a junior, mid-level or senior developer- they'll take whatever experience level they can get. Remember, saying that you
don't want to hire someone too experienced is pushing the envelope on age discrimination laws....
So if they're willing to hire someone with 2-20 years of experience, the salary range may be so broad as to be meaningless. $80-180k doesn't really tell anyone anything, and I'd imagine regulators can't do much if that's what companies put down as their range. I find that a lot of people imagine an open job & job description to be Very Rigid Categories, whereas in practice companies hiring in high-demand fields have to be flexible to find people. From the employer's point of view, that's why we find demands for the salary range to be frustrating- lots of companies really don't have a specific range in mind!
If you mandate that companies use a tight salary band, they'll simply say OK, our Software Developer 1 pays $70-90k, Software Developer 2 pays $90-11k, etc. However- we haven't decided which level of software developer we're going to hire you for. Tough for regulators to beat that approach too
So if they're willing to hire someone with 2-20 years of experience, the salary range may be so broad as to be meaningless. $80-180k doesn't really tell anyone anything, and I'd imagine regulators can't do much if that's what companies put down as their range. I find that a lot of people imagine an open job & job description to be Very Rigid Categories, whereas in practice companies hiring in high-demand fields have to be flexible to find people. From the employer's point of view, that's why we find demands for the salary range to be frustrating- lots of companies really don't have a specific range in mind!
If you mandate that companies use a tight salary band, they'll simply say OK, our Software Developer 1 pays $70-90k, Software Developer 2 pays $90-11k, etc. However- we haven't decided which level of software developer we're going to hire you for. Tough for regulators to beat that approach too