And the article is about Canonical making multiple job postings all around the world where California labor laws aren’t applicable…

Regardless, I think there are underrated issues with mandatory pay bands that aren’t obvious unless you’re on the hiring side. Let’s say you legitimately are open to hiring candidates from anywhere from $100k to $300k. For candidates closer to the $300k end they might not want to apply if they think they might get offered way less than they want, and it might attract a lot of candidates on the $100k end who will make it all the way through the process and then get upset when they’re not offered something closer to $300k. Also, for companies like Canonical, they have enough name recognition and genuine supporters that they probably don’t want to talk to candidates who are only applying because they saw a big number (and if they have to, it makes harder for candidates that are better fits to get noticed).

There’s understandably a lot of strong feelings about hiring practices right now and I know a lot of candidates will tend to assume the worst because of how they’ve been treated by other companies. But sometimes companies just make multiple listings so they show up for candidates around the world instead of as a spam tactic, are flexible on salary, and have a culture that values different things.

In California at least, nothing stops you from asking about expected pay as part of the application process and setting expectations for individual candidates early. From the applicant side, I'm constantly amazed at how many companies are shamelessly advertising senior level jobs with embarrassingly low salary ranges. Being able to weed out companies whose _upper_ bound is less than I'm making now as a government contractor (i.e. very much not FANNG pay) saves a ton of time.

I never had to work on that, but I imagine you would publish a position at the 100k-200k range, and another one at the 200k-300k range. In fact, that may still be too large a range.

Or are the people in that large range interchangeable from the employer's point of view?