> It’s also strange to me that companies aren’t willing to give a nice raise to an engineer, say from 150k to 180k but are completely fine with hiring a replacement at 180k.

This is literally the story of my professional life.

Which is fine but the budget needs to go up by inflation every year. Most places it doesn't. I've switched jobs before because my salary didn't meet inflation. Yes I was near the max for my grade and my responsibilities didn't deserve the next grade. However if I'm losing to inflation I'm gone: that is a pay cut. (I was able to transfer)

I'm actually even ok with losing to inflation if that's the market rate. My main issue is internal raises seem to be detached from market rates. I mean, why would you want to pay your engineers that are already familiar with the system and domain less than an external hire?

Maybe there is some math done somewhere that says the money saved from underpaying from reduced raises is more beneficial than the risk of losing an engineer that's already familiar only to be replaced by a more expensive engineer that's new.

It can get worse than that in a region too. Even if they adjust those tables for inflation, they’re likely not adjusting them for regional cost of living changes which are harder to determine. Cost of living in seattle has gone up considerably more than the national average, but since there’s no official number like there is for the CPI, lazy orgs are just going to use that number.