Because it's unethical to agree to work for a rate you're not actually willing to work for. She wasted a lot of people's time and resources to bring her on board for those three weeks.
>The point I'm trying to make is that the company needed her more than she needed them.
I wouldn't want to work with a person who accepts an offer and then THREE WEEKS later starts demanding raises, no matter what their skill level.
Also, she may have simply gotten an offer she couldn't refuse from another company. You could argue that this shows poor ethics, but don't delude yourself, everyone has a price. She may have been generous asking her company to match.
Let's not judge people based on thin second-hand accounts.
If they can fire us at any time, we can leave at any time.
There should be absolutely nothing in anyone that says "work for less than what you're worth".
Whatever her reasons for going for and getting what she wanted, good for her. And any ethical system that says "work for less than what you're worth in an at-will environment" is a bad ethical system, full stop.
All we know is she took a job and then took a better one.
You're claiming that's an unethical act, and I'm saying, "it's the free market, baby!" They pushed for at-will, they got it, consequences and all.
And, more broadly, I grew up in the transitionary period from "one job for life" to "throw 'em to the wolves," and I have absolutely zero sympathy for employers, in this world their policies have wrought.
I wouldn't want to work with a person who puts their own ideas about when it's appropriate to expect a raise over keeping bright people.
She didn't waste anyone's time; unlike most, she was productive from day one to the day she left. The company was wasting their own time by optimizing for low compensation and not engineering acumen.
Companies have no problem staffing projects they know will be canceled soon, or projects that are underfunded. It's a dog eat dog world, I'm afraid.
And it's likely that she _absolutely did_ waste people's time -- the company may have passed on other candidates to hire her and had to start over.
In some sense, they wasted their own time by not overpaying.
While 3 weeks sounds like a very short evaluation period, there very much could've been an arrangement like this. I hesitate to use the word 'unethical' primarily due to how pervasive Hanlon's razor really is. She gave them 3 weeks of seemingly extremely productive work and gave them a taste of the caliber of developer they could hire if they just threw enough money at the problem but it sounds like they didn't learn. Every experience like this is a chance to learn something but some companies just fold churn into the equation without properly evaluating what they could do to prevent it. Usually its those companies that think developers are just equal cogs capable of performing all the same tasks at the same magically high productivity level. They rarely learn that you sometimes actually do get what you pay for.