In my experience, when salary is narrowly banded such that there is little negotiation within the band for a position, people negotiate position as a proxy for

In my experience, when salary is narrowly banded such that there is little negotiation within the band for a position, people negotiate position as a proxy for salary. It produces the same net result in a more convoluted and opaque way. I've seen this pattern in several places. You see patterns in companies where new hires are consistently more senior than existing employees, largely because compensation has not kept up with the market rate. This creates some perverse incentives. I've worked at large companies where when compensation didn't fit an existing standardized value, they would literally create a "new position type" in the HR system for that hire that not coincidentally matched that hire's salary requirement. This caused a weird proliferation of titles that had little semantic relationship to the overall organization. At one company, they had 1,000 roles in the HR system for this reason, that at any sensible company could have been reduced to fewer than 100.