I seriously disagree with just about every point in this.
First off, transparency != lack of negotiation. It just means that your colleagues might be able to see the outcome of that negotiation. Even with salary bands you still need to determine where in the band you land on day 1, and those bands are often wide enough (10-15%) to allow quite a lot of flexibility. Also, most "large corporations" will have many job descriptions and titles indicating seniority: an Engineer II will have a wildly different salary band from Principal Engineer, leaving plenty of room for negotiation on hire.
Second, there is basically no way to determine that someone is a "10x" engineer (if such even exists) via an interview. Decades of studies across the industry have shown that interviews are a terrible means of assessing potential performance, and unless you've worked with someone on an essentially identical product in a similar company before you can't predict their output now. (Also, see above re: strawman argument about not being able to move $20k for an exemplary candidate.)
Third, if you can't build trust across teams (with or without visible salary info) you have much deeper problems than your comp being public. Fix this before everything else. If you're building "cohesiveness" by implying to your staff that every other teams makes less money (and is therefore less valued) you're setting yourself up for real problems down the road.
Finally, salary negotiation is a very different beast than feature and scope negotiation. The former assumes a selfish if not antagonistic stance ("get as much as I can") while the latter should be collaborative ("deliver the best possible outcome given our constraints"). People who are good at the former may or may not have the empathy and vision needed to deliver on the latter.
First off, transparency != lack of negotiation. It just means that your colleagues might be able to see the outcome of that negotiation. Even with salary bands you still need to determine where in the band you land on day 1, and those bands are often wide enough (10-15%) to allow quite a lot of flexibility. Also, most "large corporations" will have many job descriptions and titles indicating seniority: an Engineer II will have a wildly different salary band from Principal Engineer, leaving plenty of room for negotiation on hire.
Second, there is basically no way to determine that someone is a "10x" engineer (if such even exists) via an interview. Decades of studies across the industry have shown that interviews are a terrible means of assessing potential performance, and unless you've worked with someone on an essentially identical product in a similar company before you can't predict their output now. (Also, see above re: strawman argument about not being able to move $20k for an exemplary candidate.)
Third, if you can't build trust across teams (with or without visible salary info) you have much deeper problems than your comp being public. Fix this before everything else. If you're building "cohesiveness" by implying to your staff that every other teams makes less money (and is therefore less valued) you're setting yourself up for real problems down the road.
Finally, salary negotiation is a very different beast than feature and scope negotiation. The former assumes a selfish if not antagonistic stance ("get as much as I can") while the latter should be collaborative ("deliver the best possible outcome given our constraints"). People who are good at the former may or may not have the empathy and vision needed to deliver on the latter.