A lot of big companies outside of tech already do have semi-transparent pay structures, plus or minus some wiggle room within pay bands.

My wife works for a very large company that you've heard of. Everyone is assigned a pay band that corresponds to their title. Everyone can go on to the portal and see approximately how much someone else earns (within a narrow range) based on their level and geographical location.

It hasn't brought compensation up. If anything, it has kept it down. My wife was objectively underpaid for a while and on the verge of leaving, but HR wouldn't allow higher pay because it didn't fit the band. They pointed to her peers and showed that they were earning the same amount. Eventually she did an end-run around it by transferring divisions and getting promoted to another level, but it would have been so much easier for everyone if her boss could have just given her a raise even though it violated the pay band.

I have friends who work for the local government including the state run university. There is a website where anyone can go search for their name and see exactly how much they were paid per year, down to the penny. Having browsed the website I can say it has not resulted in higher compensation, as they're all paid surprisingly little.

> everyone is assigned a pay band that corresponds to their title

Hilariously, some big companies work around this by having several entries in the HR systems for a single official title, each with independent pay bands, since the title was not required to be unique within the database. I remember one company had around a thousand different independent entries for a much smaller number of technical titles accumulated from making individual exceptions.

Even if someone had the same title as you on the same team, there would be no correlation with pay bands. They liked to use this to hide the fact that new hires were being paid significantly more than people that had been hired a few years prior.

Yes but in the large companies I’ve worked for (IBM, for example), equity grants exist outside the band structure and are negotiated on a case by case basis.

You can get life changing amounts of money by being offered a strategic project and asking for a huge option grant as a bonus if you deliver.

> Everyone is assigned a pay band that corresponds to their title. Everyone can go on to the portal and see approximately how much someone else earns (within a narrow range) based on their level and geographical location.

> It hasn't brought compensation up. If anything, it has kept it down. My wife was objectively underpaid for a while and on the verge of leaving,

Can you expand on this because it's not making any logical sense.

Is the company underpaying everyone with that title, is her work not in line with her title (as compared to other employers), or is there something else (I'm hesitant to call BS, but there is a tendency within these types of conversations for people to invent scenarios to try and portray some sort of political narrative - for the left and right)