There was an article a few years ago about a Google employee. Competitor interviewed, offered what they thought was a great package around 500k, found out candidate was making 3mil at Google. Failure on the recruiter part not getting that info beforehand, but can understand more senior folks not discussing till the end.
actually it's the sound a manager makes when they have to talk to their staff: "another round of one-on-ones, ic!"
Meanwhile, I had to sit through an all hands meeting where some dingy broad got a 5 figure award for cooking up an Access database that some asshat manager used for like a week!
Franz Kafka could not dream this up!
Just praise people in private, actually trust them and listen to them and reward them accordingly comes compensation time.
This sounds like every tech company ever. I used to excitedly watch youtube videos about the extreme measures startups took to scale to "massive" amounts of traffic while undergoing huge growth spurts.
Now I just kind of roll my eyes and think "Yeah, obviously a message bus in a relational databse using rails wasn't the optimal solution for scaling that app".
In the real world emergencies happen. The unexpected happens. But the truth is that if you actually prepare and have been around the block once or twice, they don't happen all that often. And when they do, there's usually a handy little knob to ameliorate the issue.
Public announcements of awards and raises, hell no.
Employees aren't worth the market value of their job title on the open market. They are worth the cost of replacing their contributions to the company's bottom line plus any gap in contribution that the market is unable to replace. Often early employees (regardless of objective skill level) hold tremendous non-commodity value to fast growing companies. It is ultimately very costly behavior to think of these employees as commodities.
[late note: the bottom line oriented valuation method that I outline, can of course be negative. If we take the gp's assertions as given, then the employee in question is clearly worth more to the firm than his/her 'commodity' price on the market. But it is possible for the commodity value to be higher than the value of a given employee, even once the transactional turnover costs are taken into account. In such cases, it may be preferable to allow the employee to seek his/her fortunes elsewhere. I note this to make it clear that this sort of valuation model doesn't unduly bias the firm toward retaining low or negative producing employees. By the same token, it frees the firm to recognize value in excess of 'replacement value', as any reasonable worker productivity model should]
Despite being able to show I could get paid much more at a tech-company, my company will not pay me more. However, you are claiming that the opposite is also true. You are not paid based on the value you can provide to an organization, but based on how much you COULD provide to other organizations.
So I think you are wrong. These are all just attempts to justify why companies are averse to highly paid employees, but will happily spend 10x a key employee's salary on a new machine or on a month worth of consultants.