I'm bouncing back and forth between "ah shit, and I thought they were cool..." and... Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?
Is a man not entitled to his own worth and value? I see nothing wrong with that, if your engineer can easily be sniped by a competing company willing to offer enough salary increase to convince somebody to move out of his job and jump to a new platform/environment/learning process, maybe you should be paying him more. You're not willing to? Well maybe that single engineer wasn't that vital to your company after all.
It seems easy to avoid to me. You either pay the wages required to keep important people in the building or you illegally collude with your competitors to keep them in the building. Bonus that the second option lowers your payroll costs as well.
Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?
Not true in comparison to other job types. I think engineers enjoy on-boarding the least. If you have 5 jobs in 10 years, that's 5 periods (about 6-9 months) of being "the new guy" and (a) performing at a suboptimal level, because you're learning idiosyncratic details of a closed-source tech stack, and (b) being unlikely to get useful projects because, no matter how good you are, every organization's going to put new people through a dues-paying period. That ends up taking 3-4 years out of your career, time essentially wasted on learning parochial details of internal codebases rather than getting better at the craft in general. Not fun.
Engineers move around so much because they have to, not because they want to. Wages are too low relative to housing costs, and advancement is often political, and interesting projects are too thin on the ground because engineer-driven companies are a rarity.
