The power balance is already pretty heavily in the favour of employers. This just perpetuates the status quo of treating programmers as interchangeable commodities which come with fixed price labels.
bitsweet mentioned below[2] that my selection is used only as a filter and not shown to employers, but I think that could stand to be made more clear either during the signup process or somewhere on the landing page.
EDIT for another slightly related point: I take it this is for US-based employers at the moment. Are there any plans to expand to other markets? Now that I'm moving to Berlin, I'd love to use something like Pitchbox in my job search (though incidentally, salaries are a completely different story over there).
Thanks for the feedback though, we'll certainly be exploring a different sign up ux.
The developer retains all the control...for example the salary is only used by Pitchbox, not the employer, as one of our filters in the matching process. We ask companies for their compensation ceiling and developers for their compensation floor to make sure engineers aren't matched with companies that are not within the same range.
Every pitch a developer receives includes compensation information among other things.
I've been speaking to a few companies recently, and apart from tactics like trying to fish out a salary number, I've also been surprised by their unresponsiveness to emails, strong dislike for employee side projects, and unrealistic expectations.
Everyone's crying about how hard hiring is, but if this is how they treat employees, it's not surprising really.
I wish you luck with Pitchbox and hope you can help improve the situation.