I’m really surprised you say that. 90% of the jobs I look at for ‘software developer’ do not state salary. I have seen a couple with a ‘salary range’ but most don’t mention it or say “dependent on experience”.

I’ve been working in software for 15 years now in the UK and that’s always been my experience. Even though it’s standard, I still don’t see it as normal that such a vital piece of information is always missing.

Employee desperation to have income and health insurance means it's worth going into the interviews blind.

Without explicit salary ranges, the market functions through implicit cultural expectations about what an appropriate salary should be. Which of course has a lot of problems. For example, US software engineering salaries are stereotypically bimodal, and one of the staples of our mid 2010s job market discourse was people who'd only seen one hump insisting that the other can't possibly exist. (The question of whether there's actually two humps or just a wide range, I don't know if I've ever seen resolved.)

But usually it seems like they are used to claim superiority. "As a <identity politics tribe member>, this is why my perspective is more important than yours and you are wrong."