Every developer has had this conversation. Four interview rounds, a take-home task, and then a number that was never going to work, which both sides could have known in the first minute.
The usual defence of hiding it is that the range depends on the candidate. That is true, and it is also why a range exists. "60 to 80 thousand depending on experience" costs the employer nothing and saves everyone a week.
What actually happens when you hide it
You do not get more applicants, you get worse ones. People who know their market rate filter out listings without a number, because experience taught them what the silence usually means. The people who stay in the funnel are the ones with the least information about what they are worth, and hiring them cheaply is a short-term win with a long-term bill attached.
You also lose the ones you most wanted. Someone who is currently employed and reasonably paid will not spend four evenings on a process to discover the number is 20 percent below where they are.
The counter-argument that is actually real
Existing employees will compare themselves to the listing. That is a legitimate worry and it has one honest answer: if publishing your range causes trouble internally, the trouble already existed and you were just not being told about it.
What we do about it
On DevConnect, a job listing cannot be posted without a salary range. Not "competitive", not "DOE", a number. It is a required field, so there is nothing to negotiate about it.
That is not a moral position, it is a practical one. A job board where half the listings hide the number is a job board where you have to open every listing to find out if it is worth your time, and that makes the whole thing worth less.
You can see what that looks like here: https://devconnectplatform.com/jobs.?ref=devto It is free to post, there is no advertising, and there are not many listings yet, because it is new.
If you are hiring and your range genuinely cannot be published, that is worth sitting with for a minute. Usually it can.
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