If a trucking company is losing money, they still have to pay market wages for drivers if they want any trucks to move.
If a trucking company is making large profits because of the types of trucks they bought, their niche, their sales teams, they still basically pay market prices for drivers I would assume.
freezing the pay sends the message of: "we don't really care about the workers and we will extract as much value as it's possible for the lowest possible fee". The problem with knowledge workers is that sometimes it literally takes years to build the skill needed and if you don't actively work on retaining people you will end up with empire building and the minimum work not to get fired instead of exceptional people that can move the needle - the brain drain is real.
to drive this point home: if you have 100 people that you are paying 100 dollars you are paying 10k. if you give them a raise and now you are paying them 105 dollars you are not paying 10.5k. if you don't give them a raise and you tell them to suck it up, 20 people leave and now you need to hire 40 people to be able to pickup the work they were doing, now you will pay 14k. So while in theory you are getting a bargain keeping the comp at 100, you in reality are paying more. Even worse, you may get ideas that you don't need 100 people and layoff 30 people with the remaining people doing the work of 100 people - so in effect you are getting more work for that 100$ and people are actually taking a paycut relative to how much they are working.
It’s not a charity. Neither are we as engineers - the job hopping we’re famous for is evidence of that.
Proper planning, execution, building knowledge? Fuck that. We'll just jerk people around. What are they going to do? Form an union?
Also, you don't like people wanting to make more money? That's like capitalism 101. What's next? People volunteering to work for free and living outdoors?
I call this "business as usual". Whenever I need to choose between prioritizing myself vs prioritizing my employer, I try to use the "business as usual" philosophy in which I understand that the employer would fire me if they had to choose to save money (rather than for example cutting CEO's salary or in any other way looking at employee's interests). So I prioritize myself. I learned this lesson when I was contracting for a client and the client told me, on Friday afternoon that starting from next week he doesn't need my services anymore. Basically he fired me on the spot. Next week I noticed that someone was still making programming changes to the site. Seems like he hired a bunch of inexperienced inexpensive developers to do the work. Needless to say, a year later he asked me to jump back in, and I did for double the price. He, in his true "business as usual" style, didn't even blink. He needed the job done and was willing to pay the price I offered. Business as usual. Great life lesson.
It has parallels to this Doordash delivery person who expected their tip to be based on the price of the customer's house rather than the price of the order.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doordash-driver-curses-...
There isn't great evidence for this. There was a burst of anti-tipping laws in the 19th century as aristocratic Americans imitated the Tudor English where modern tipping originated. It only became endemic in America during Prohibition, when a lack of alcohol-based income and the, ahem, two-way desire for favors, increased.
Not giving raises is another form of increasing gradual attrition on purpose as well.
Microsoft's play here is that even if their best engineers go look for greener pastures their profits won't be affected. It might be true, but that feels like a bold move.
It is. Anything an executive or company spokesperson says to the contrary is lying. If Microsoft really wanted to retain someone who said they were going to walk if they did not get an increase, then they would pony up.