> I do appreciate your candor, though, and I hope you won't be offended at mine.

Not offended at all.

I would argue, however, that the best way to get good at negotiation is to actually gain a strong understanding of what it means to do your job well.

The real risk I see with open salaries is that most engineers tend to overvalue engineering knowledge and undervalue business understanding. So they'll see the solid engineer with great business savvy as overpaid when he makes more than the other intermediate engineers. Companies, unfortunately, will be pressured to underpay their top performers.

If you actually understand what it means to be good at your job and you are good at your job, and you feel you've negotiated a salary that reflects your actual worth...

What are you worried about?

It seems to me that you'd only need to be worried if you believed your compensation came at the expense of others. If it doesn't, then you should be fine.

Said better than I could. Alternatively, this is a form of negotiation, just a moderately collective one (not to be confused with collective bargaining): you now need to defend your salary to your peers, not just your boss. Meanwhile, when your peers push on open salaries, that is how they are negotiating, because they don't find the present approach optimal for them. So, like all good business books encourage, they're doing something creative/unexpected but completely above-board to improve their bargaining position.

> Companies, unfortunately, will be pressured to underpay their top performers.

Or to educate their engineers as to what it means to perform so that they understand why their top performers are really top performers (and simultaneously understand the skills they should be developing to be top performers.)

Which, if you think about it, the companies should be doing anyway, independent of open salaries. But open salaries would increase the obvious incentive...