You know this. I know this. Pretty much everyone in tech knows this. But this isn’t about only Google paying lower, Google already pays lower than competitors and still hires talented people. This is more about market wide pressure to suppress wages. If every company does the same, suddenly the quality engineers start getting paid a lot less than they should be.

Of course over a course of a longer period, this drives up competition and new startups capitalize on the opportunity, but in the short term it resets the wages until the cycle starts again.