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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

>> The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market.

>> Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago.

That only works if your business makes piles of money, like investment banks. Or FAANG.

The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent.

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> The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent.

If the % of money allocated to talent is so low that the business cannot survive, then the business has no intrinsic right to survive. One possible exception to this would be a mission-driven non-profit, but that's not what we're talking about here.

If the business can't turn a profit and pay engineers at the same time, of course they shouldn't survive, but I don't think that is what they were saying.

There are plenty of viable business solutions that don't require paying every engineer 500k+.

The rest of you waste more money hiring 5-10x more mediocre engineers to try to mitigate the bus factor or whatever. And it's still not as good a product as it will be built by a handful of good, over paid and over worked engineers who really know what they're doing.

Most "over paid" engineers are smart enough not to get in a position where they can become over worked :)

That is a hypothesis that may be true in some cases. In other cases it may be better to have two redundant engineers at 150K than one at 500k.

The idea that there is a single solution is absurd.

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