Arguing how much applicable experience one actually has is a central part of salary negotiation.

Exactly - there is no such thing as "no negotiation"

At many companies, the offer is made with no negotiation on the table. I suppose some of this is posturing, but the companies acting on good-intent are saying "no negotation -- because we know this is a good/great rate for your experience in the current market".

Not only this, I've seen engineers with 1 yoe way stronger and more mature than engineers with 4+ yoe (that just slacked off somewhere).

Thanks for adding the salary range.

> Salary $110-200k based on experience (not negotiation)

What does “experience” encompass?

For example most of the companies dismiss my seven years of open-source contributions (it's — at best — a nice bonus). They don't care about anything that isn't what they call “industry experience”.

Hiring managers/recruiters may filter those out, but I think if you're talking to an engineer, they can kind of discern whether those open-source contributions are meaningfully equivalent to yoe. I was working as a software engineer up until I started the company, so it's 100% meaningful signal to me!

Fantastic, I love it. Let's keep this going!