Comment by Areading314

A huge problem with this industry is the inflexibility to pay current engineers LARGELY increasing comp each year. The thought is that there is a market rate for an engineer and that pay can increase with the market rate, but this is a fallacy. An engineer that has been at a largish company for 1 year is worth 20-30% more than the year they were hired because they have specific knowledge of the tech stack. Yet that engineer will likely be offered a 3-5% raise. An engineer with 3+ years might be worth 50%+ because they have developed the specific skills relevant to the job AND know the idiosyncacies about org politics and the nitty gritty parts of the codebase. Yet they will still only get a 10-15% raise. So that engineer moves on and accepts a 40% raise elsewhere. And thus we see the constant churn of highly talented engineers which is a huge drain on productivity for all involved.