If you're filling an opening by promotion you'll still have to find someone new to fill the position that has been vacated with that promotion: and now you've got 2 new people vs 1 when hiring from outside.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish
In the last year as RTO has started to replace WFH, I've begun to consider whether it's worth looking for a new position. My minimum calculus is that is has to at least pay me as much as I make now, be remote, provide me with the amount of autonomy I currently have, and have workers and managers I enjoy working with.
Remote isn't hard to satisfy now, at least for the near-term future. Pay, I can probably get a 10-15% raise. Coworkers and managers I like? Who knows. Autonomy? Who knows. Both of those are a roll of the dice, no matter how carefully you investigate prior to taking a position.
So for a 10% raise? That's a pretty big risk. Now if your current compensation sucks, or you hate your boss, sure. But I think that most people are risk-averse (at least I am), and most will stick with a less than optimal situation.
It is only good for the company if you stay and don't take the position you're earned.
So when we started using AWS, we really made a lot of mistakes by trying to replicate how we did things on-prem. And there was a lot of resistance to using cloud services; some people viewed it as a threat to job security. Others simply had a difficult time adjusting to the change in operations/procedures and philosophy.
This held us back quite a bit until we hired a few contractors who helped us better understand where we needed to change, which features worked well in the cloud (and which sucked). We brought the best contractors onboard as FTEs, and it's been a much better experience.
One of my employers 60% of the company had spent all or most of their professional career there - and things were scrolerotic at times - because there was a huge amount of group think, and a strong NIH/"the way we do it is fine" problem - simply because of a lack of indexing to how other players did it.
You ideally want around 50/50, 50% lifers, and 50% new blood, its even helpful to encourage employees to leave go get knowledge elsewhere and then come back later if they desire.
Yes, but our society changed to see every inefficiency as a fault to fix, which makes situations like this increasingly rare
It turns out the inefficient places tend to get out-competed and are forced to change or wither and die.
It turns out that a lot of 'efficiency optimisation' is done inconpetently, like removing 'un-needed' parts from a car: seatbelts, airbags - they just add extra weight!
Lika federal aviation authority hiring engineers from boeing to check their own work to 'improve efficiency'
If you want less fragility, there has to be a way to be paid for providing reliable supply in times of disruption.
Oh and greed? Yup. Look at the profit margins for the Exxon this year. For any of the Fortune 500. Last year and this year will be banner years for big corporations that have raised prices either directly or through "shrinkflation." They're loving it, while consumers get the shaft, and the Fed gets the blame.