Hi,
Person currently in middle management here. While we'd love to pay our good people more, at a moderately sized company and up, we operate under an unbelievable number of constraints, from HR, finance, etc.
Recruiting and onboarding a new engineer takes months and the lost productivity is at least 100K when you factor in engineering hours spent interviewing, recruiter fees, months for new dev to learn code base, etc.
In a company where HR or Finance runs tech, you’ll get one set of outcomes. Those outcomes are likely different than if tech runs tech. It’s not shocking to me that Google and Netflix get the results that they do; in those companies, HR/Finance isn’t running tech.
If not, you are forever going to be stuck in the cycle of hiring and attrition.
And blindly accepting things as it is, is the root cause of corporate decay.
If you want a high performance team that cares about management and the job, management will have to return the favor. If corporate structures prevent managers from doing this, managers need to band together and fight HR or whoever is far behind the curve.
Sorry, you are representing your company to the ICs. If you, a middle manager, can't talk to the powers-that-be to change the system, your reports will lose their trust towards you.
You need to have a realistic view of how things work to make progress, and managers banding together is comically unrealistic.