I can assure you as a (reluctant) manager I definitely care. Its literally the only reason I'm management. I'm also constantly having discussions with the people who generally make these kind of broad decisions about how unrealistic their decision making processes are. I tend to start those conversations with some variant on "it doesn't matter what you say the raise limits are for a person, the market sets those things and the market right now says you're wrong".

It turns out that deciding what a software developer is worth is a very challenging proposition because deciding which ones are good is an open problem. Probably the central open problem in our industry today. But salary conversations are largely not about that. In sufficiently large organizations they are about how well you, or your manager if they are good, play the game, and in smaller ones its about having the cash flow to back up outstanding liabilities.

In any case, I think its fair to characterize these approaches as a tactic, whether its a negotiation tactic or a real cost limitation varies from organization to organization but its not the employees job to worry about that. If you are in a good organization they are constantly making the value proposition to the company make sense, if not they aren't and you shouldn't feel guilty about either asking for more pay or leaving if it isn't provided.

> it doesn't matter what you say the raise limits are for a person, the market sets those things and the market right now says you're wrong

This is very common. They often justify it with "In this company we're not paying as much, but we have greater freedom/cooler tech/<other benefit>". Well good for you. We have already established that we're a good fit, but I'm not working for 20% less than I can across the street.

I don't think there is anything wrong with justifying a lower pay rate that way. I have definitely taken lower paying jobs for those very reasons. When you are making that value proposition you accept that some potential employees you'll miss out on because the money is not there.

The problematic behavior is when the people setting the pay bands get the value proposition wrong or they think they are paying market when they are not.

Well, ATM I tell everyone that unless they add 15% to my current salary I won't even listen; I love the place I work ATM, they have been consistently nice for 18 months straight and I actually enjoy work.

I also have an OK salary so this is partially about reducing risk and partially about giving something back.

They can try and justify it, but as it turns out I can't pay the rent with "greater freedom".

IME that's usually a lie. Worse working conditions almost always correlated with lower pay.

Replace-ability is actually a solid negotiation tactic, but that's not the same as intransigence regarding budget.

The characterization of management as incompetents backastabbers is as childish as the one that says employees are lazy bums who should be grateful of their salary.

A million times this. The insidious part is that if you come up in that kind of management culture, it destroys your motivation and ethics to where you actually become a bad employee. You will then be less hirable by good companies, and hence the vicious cycle. It's really a type of abusive relationship.

You're correct. But it has been cultivated from seeing too many good engineers laid off due to bad management. Bad management who get to keep their jobs.

The type of company and management I'd recommend people strive to work with prefers to retain good staff rather than hire fresh.

Hiring itself and losses from going without are very expensive, I find it weird that any company wouldn't rather retain. I wouldn't ever be surprised that hiring cost $10k all up.

If a company only used external recruiters for any position above 100K it's going to cost them 15K+. More likely 25K. Now if they try on their own as well by posting jobs, hiring internal recruiters, network... Hiring is expensive.

Recruiters take up to 20% of first year salary or more plus the time to retrain, a 10k dev is a cheap one.

In Chicago, some recruiters have started asking for 30%. I've refused to work with these companies but rates are definitely going up.

London here. Thought it was 10-20%

I asked a recruiter that placed me and he said he's usually taking 20-35% :D

Great, that's win. The company gets another interchangeable cog that they value equally and the developer that leaves gets to work someplace better.

I notice you don't mention increasing revenue or cutting costs anywhere in your analysis.

Which is exactly why any developer in that situation needs to get out as soon as they can find a better position. Such a company is obviously not going to prosper in the long run.