First, the numbers in my post were explicitly randomized non-representative examples, whether the 80-200 first example or 100-120 second example; and they were intentionally different so nobody would pick on a random example and focus on those numbers instead of my wider point :)

But yes; two people could have the same title on their business card, and bring different expertise and experience, perform different duties and contributions, generate different value, and have different compensation.

I would think this is trivially true - e.g. you have "CEO"s that make any given amount of money, with order of magnitude different compensations even though their title and even job description may be at some level comparable (though CEO compensation is famously contentious, and I for one think should be less extreme, but that's another topic entirely).

I was in a company where "Senior Developer" meant "I've been hanging around this place for 12 months after graduating", and another place where "Senior Developer" meant "I can code a space shuttle AND the HR database that supports the astronauts". "Enterprise Architect" or "Solution Designer" can similarly have vastly different experience, skills or contributions.

It comes down to what one truly means about "equivalent roles", and even more so "same work". I would intellectually assume there are situations and jobs where two people can truly be equivalent in every way; but it's rare where I'm at - we're all special snowflakes, not machines which reliably and boringly produce consistently the same output.

Example,FWIW: my background is as "PeopleSoft Administrator" - basically a sysadmin/DBA/NetworkAdmin/infra in PeopleSoft ecosystem. The skillset and output is vastly, vastly different between two people in the same role. From those who can follow a checklist and mostly reliably build a server if told exactly what to do, to those who can design and risk asses/mitigate massive systems, and troubleshoot critical production problems.

What happens is - lets say I have two senior and one junior PSADMIN on the team, and I want to grow the team, so I open a junior psadmin seat to get somebody to train up. But then I interview somebody and holly caramoli, this person can whip weblogics into submission and optimize queries and create new indexes and automate maintenance like nobody's business; I want that person; I need that person on my team; this person can mentor my senior psadmins and bring everybody up and help us out hugely. I would now like to offer this person a higher salary than I had in mind for the original junior psadmin role I posted.

It happens other way around - I open a senior PSADMIN seat, but I get an eager, enthusiastic new grad who was bold enough to apply, and we think we can train them up but not necessarily at the rate for the Senior PSADMIN seat.

And if I want to capture every conceivable edge case for the seat I open, add geographical dependencies and what not, yeah, the range will be pretty wide. OR, if the range is narrow enough to be useful AND enforced, it'll severely limit the flexibility of who and what I can hire.

Do note I started my initial comment explicitly through my personal lens if I were to apply as a candidate, but with some limited experience in hiring - sure, I like ads that have salary ranges; but my original point was simple - I would not, as a candidate, necessarily binary reject posts without salary; and I might even apply for positions with posted salary range which is too high or too low for my expectations (yes, I once negotiated salary down, because I wanted to put a limit on my scope & responsibilities). I have also, as an employee, personally shied away from public sector positions with grid salaries. To each their own but wanted to share my perspective :)

I understand we all want to feel indignant and upset at injustice (myself included!:), and there's a lot of VERY real injustice happening, and there ARE people doing similar work for vastly different amount of money and we should fix that; but not everything is a subjugation conspiracy, sometimes it's just regular people doing regular work the best they can, and I think flexibility on average is good rather than top-down process and overbearing limits from HQ - that wouldn't let me hire that person for what they're worth.

I am terribly worried that forced posted and enforced salary ranges will in fact lead to salaries lower for everyone, not salaries higher for everyone. I fear it'll end with lowest common denominator as opposed to some form of meritocracy, and may not be what we as employees actually benefit from. Maybe I'm paranoid, we'll see!