It's a bit presumptuous to suggest the OP "has limited perspective on how career development, seniority, and hiring work".
Also, I most certainly do sort by price when I'm looking for real estate: I have a budget, after all. Same thing with employment: most people have needs that salary requirements can meet, and it's pointless to look for jobs outside the range one can accept. Therefore it's almost certainly the best and most useful first thing to sort by.
Others have more freedom. For example, thanks to a recent IPO I can literally work for no salary and be fine. I have far more freedom to consider other details about a job than 99% of the population.
> It's a bit presumptuous to suggest the OP "has limited perspective ...
This is going to be very meta and not about salary so feel free to skip :)
When I disagree with someone, I try to find where we are disconnected. It's usually one of two things: we reach divergent conclusions either because we are aware of different facts, or because we're interpreting those facts through different values lens.
A good quick heuristic of a fact missing if when someone talks about either one side of the equation or even worse, makes both sides line up to their conclusion.
For example: "we should use Python - it's the best dev experience, we are only using C++ cuz our lead engineer is stupid" versus "We use C++ because of performance attributes, but I argue we can be fast-enough in Python and get better dev-experience"
The 2nd statement shows awareness of both sides of the argument and then proposes a solution that accounts for them. The 1st side is missing the context for why someone would do something other than what they want to do - suggesting they don't have perspective on that and making it likely that their solution doesn't account for it (or if it does, only by accident.)
In the discussion at hand, the original poster clearly prefers salary ranges and his model for why companies don't publish them is that they are evil. To me that suggests that they are lacking perspectives on the cases where salary ranges are either impossible to share or end up working in the employee's favor. Having had this conversation many times before, I attribute this lack of perspective on not having the senior hiring experience either from candidate or company side where one would have picked up the perspective.
To sum it all up, yet there's a bit of presumption in my suggestion but at the same time - you have to be able to assert things or else you'd never be able to make any points.
Also, I most certainly do sort by price when I'm looking for real estate: I have a budget, after all. Same thing with employment: most people have needs that salary requirements can meet, and it's pointless to look for jobs outside the range one can accept. Therefore it's almost certainly the best and most useful first thing to sort by.
Others have more freedom. For example, thanks to a recent IPO I can literally work for no salary and be fine. I have far more freedom to consider other details about a job than 99% of the population.