I want to find a company and encourage the sort of company that pays all its employees fairly, well and with regular cost of living adjustments along with promotions (or raises), that I can remain with and see through it.
As employees, we should be encouraging companies to grow a culture of employee retention; and employers should be efforting toward the same.
This race to the bottom needs to stop; and, "Hacker News" wants to be a place full of startups. That is, a place full of companies that can make those decisions for their whole staff early and cultivate that style, themselves.
It’s fine to stay where you are. Stick around, know the place inside out, embrace the culture, be the culture!
But, if the goal is to maximize take home pay, the answer is to regularly find a new workplace. That’s the only way to maintain an annualized compensation growth rate that exceeds inflation.
There's a lot of books on it, "Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond .." is a good one (more towards Staff rather than Mgr/Director).
I rarely see people being hired at those levels, it's usually people from within the org that gets promoted with time.
If Bob from Accounting convinces Dave the VP your number is suboptimal or worse, counterproductive, you're gone, after 20 years of loyal and probably underpaid service.