Evaluating compensation trends in the technology sector often relies on datasets that suffer from significant selection bias. Traditional salary statistics typically compute averages exclusively over job listings that choose to disclose pay, completely omitting organizations that keep compensation figures hidden from public view. A comprehensive new analysis published on October 24, 2026, attempts to correct this distortion by establishing a true denominator across thousands of public listings from major applicant tracking systems.
Establishing a True Denominator in Job Market Research
According to the analysis detailed in source s1, researchers examined the public job feeds of 266 companies across prominent applicant tracking platforms including Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, and Workable. After thorough de-duplication, the crawl encompassed 18,668 total job postings. Out of this comprehensive denominator, only 8,039 postings actually stated a pay range. By anchoring calculations against every read posting rather than just the subset of transparent listings, the resulting dataset avoids distorted conclusions regarding remote pay differentials or average engineering salaries.
Opaque Hiring Practices Among Well-Funded Enterprises
The findings demonstrate that board-level transparency rates can frequently obscure individual corporate behaviors. While specific companies operating on boards like Ashby and Greenhouse maintain transparent compensation practices, the data highlights a stark contrast at the opposite end. Specifically, eleven well-funded companies actively hiring with more than 40 open roles each published zero salary ranges across any of their postings, confirming that the absence of pay data stems from deliberate omission rather than technical scraping artifacts.
Granular Disclosures at Individual Companies
While the broader study aggregates data across hundreds of organizations, specific company breakdowns provide a closer look at internal publishing habits. For instance, data focused on the company rain captured from Ashby on October 24, 2026, revealed that 37 postings carried a published pay range, while others omitted compensation entirely, differing from aggregate board-level observations by focusing on role-specific percentiles and medians rather than macro-level trends across multiple employers.
Further examining the disclosures from rain illustrates how individual metrics materialize in practice. Across its 37 transparent postings, the median midpoint sat at $200,000, with the middle fifty percent ranging between $157,500 and $225,000, and the 90th percentile reaching $240,000. Engineering emerged as the largest role family with nine listings showing a median of $225,000, though these figures represent purely what the company published in annualised USD ranges rather than definitive total compensation packages.
Methodological Challenges and the Broader Impact on Market Analysis
This research underscores the critical importance of rigorous denominator discipline when evaluating technology labor markets. Historical industry reporting has often fallen victim to methodological pitfalls, such as mixing distinct bases between numerators and denominators or failing to properly parse text strings—such as mistaking incidental hourly references for inflated annual figures. By releasing an open dataset under a CC BY 4.0 license, the project provides researchers and developers with normalized annual figures while separating self-reported transparency from complete market visibility. The contrast between aggregate datasets tracking 266 companies and targeted examinations of individual entities like rain reveals that transparency is unevenly distributed even among financially healthy employers. Ultimately, these insights demonstrate that evaluating tech sector compensation requires looking beyond sanitized averages to account for the substantial volume of companies that choose to publish no salary information whatsoever.
Editorial graphic and headline text by Signal Titans.
Source: 11 companies with 40+ open roles publish a salary on none of them · rain salary ranges: 37 published postings, median $200,000
SIGNAL TITANS
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