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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

If companies (specifically management) were actually competent, they would know that it takes $20k-$40k to fill one position, $80k-$100k for that individual to optimistically ramp up to an existing employees productivity. All this takes at least 1 year.

Instead of the time and money spent, they could easily boost the compensation of an existing employee by $25k and not lose money or time.

But of course, nobody ever claimed that management is competent.

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I've always assumed a bean counter somewhere crunched the numbers and when you adjust for people who don't leave because of the stress of interviewing + friction of switching + uncertainty of new manager, it works out better for them to not do this.

It only works out because existing employees are squeezed of every drop of productivity, leading to them to quit. Ultimately, the end game for the hiring manager herself is to get poor ratings and quitting.

There's a reason why FIRE is so popular in tech industry. It is led by incompetent fools in positions of making arbitrary decisions without consequences, until it's too late to salvage anything.

Yes, companies need to be way more aggressive in keeping current folks and changing their pay bands quickly in these situations. The problem for much of big tech is that the managers hiring have no real control over the pay bands so it’s left to folks who tend to not be in the software engineering group and do pay ‘studies’ that take a long time to show they are competitive in calculating their pay bands. This works until it doesn’t, then by the time you realize you lost people and can’t hire fast to replace them, you’ve fallen behind your competitors

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