Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

I don't think people should work for below market wages, only observing how it can change what kinds of products and services are available. And in the case of tech talent, salaries are being driven up by a few key industries that arguably are not where society would like to see tech product and r&d investment concentrated.

Instead of the time and money spent, they could easily boost the compensation of an existing employee by $25k and not lose money or time.

But of course, nobody ever claimed that management is competent.

Lather, rinse, repeat for each offer. The better offer may be salary, perks, or just better work conditions. I once left a company after working there for 9 days because I got an offer working with my friend. I didn't even get a better salary and my friend ended up leaving after 3 months..

I've worked at some great companies with some great people and I certainly will again in the future. But my experience also contains burnout amounts of internal politics, radioactive code, Kylo Rens, "I'm just the ideas guy", et cetera. People love to glamorize it with foozeball tables and free pop machines, but in the end it's pretty stressful work for a lot of people and comes with few guarantees of employment stability or sanity. I'm not even going to get into what's happening at Blizzard right now, why would I want to work there? Do I want to listen to my friends yell at me because I work for the social network turning their grandparents into anti-science zealots? Do I want to be forced to live in a city I don't want to live in? These aren't salary problems for me.

A perfectly reasonable person may take their chances on a different profession, or downsizing their life, moving to a less expensive place and requiring less income, working on a small startup with their friend. Or living in a van and hiking a lot, which is a lot cheaper and probably also a lot more gratifying than an expensive apartment in a suburb of Expensive Tech Town. Perhaps the chaos, uncertainty, and mortality of the last year has simply made people re-consider their lives and professions. It's what a large percentage of my tech heroes ended up doing (I miss you all, but I understand).

From my experience, I would recommend these companies focus on creating environments that work for and reward sane people on a long term basis, rather than just try to coat over their problems with money. It's a far more better strategy for the people one would actually want to hire than trying to dump raw salary on people for six months until they're too broken to show up to work, then hiring new people that don't understand the code to clean up the mess. When I do startups, being a place people want to work is the only choice we can provide because we just can't out-compete most groups on salary anyways.