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The roles behind “None of 2,667 US Engineering Job Applications Asks Your Current Salary. 87 Ask What You Expect”

Read on 10 November 2026 from the public Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever job boards: 186 boards, 23,359 postings of every kind. A posting qualified when its title described a software, data, machine learning, security, platform, mobile or infrastructure engineering role, with the same filter as our September count: 4,908 postings. Postings of one company with the same title and the same opening 400 characters are one role.

The main sample is 2,667 roles open in the United States at the 136 companies based there, counting only roles whose application form could be read. Where each company is based, with the source, is in companies.json.

The pay in the posting. Each board keeps pay in a field of its own (Greenhouse pay_input_ranges, Ashby compensation, Lever salaryRange), and many companies print it in the text instead. Both were read. A role prints the pay if any of its postings has a US dollar range in the field, a range of two annual dollar amounts in the text, or a single dollar amount stated as the pay for a period (interns are often paid by the hour or month). The pattern and every spelling it had to learn are in analyze.py; the matched words for each role are in the table below and in role-pay.json. 2,487 of the 2,667 roles, 93.3%, print the pay.

The application form. The questions a candidate answers when applying are public on all three boards. Every question whose wording, help text or answer options mention salary, compensation, pay, wages, earnings, bonus, equity, expectations, offers or similar words was kept, 227 distinct questions; most of them turned out not to be about pay. Only question text, answer options and whether a question is required were kept; nothing was submitted.

Labels. A language model (Claude) labeled each question under written instructions, twice and blind: the second run saw the questions in a different order and not the first run’s answers. The two runs agree on every field for 227 of 227 questions. No person checked every label, which is why every one is printed below.

Where each role is comes from the location the board gives; states.py turns it into US states. Which states require a pay range in postings, and which bar questions about pay history, as checked on 10 November 2026 with sources: legal-timeline.md, summarized in laws.json. Every figure in the article is in results.txt, the unedited output of the analysis script. Long dashes inside quoted text are printed here as hyphens; the data files keep them.

What the forms ask about pay

By company

Companies based in the United States, their software engineering roles open in the US with a readable form, how many print the pay, and how many forms ask each kind of pay question.

Every form question, with its label

Question text, then the answer options after ||. All postings in the sweep, not only the main sample; most are not about pay. Required: in how many of the postings carrying it the question must be answered.

Every role

The main sample. Pay printed: where it was found and the words matched. Pay questions: the questions labeled as about pay, quoted.