This. It's a different game right now. As an employer it's very hard to take everyone's salary up 20% because that's what they might get elsewhere. So you don't. So people leave. But this won't last forever.

> But this won't last forever.

I feel like this quote is relevant, if slightly off topic:

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

i.e. You may run out of good candidates long before your competitors stop offering 20% more than you.

Plenty of companies are offering 20% more for new hires but aren't willing to bump the pay of their entire workforce by 20% at once, especially since much of the workforce might not be looking. They still may lose their best workers, but they can ramp up to the new budget more gradually.

Give it long enough and something irrational will just become rational. Especially when people have only ever experienced the irrational.

Ha. I've heard that for 20 years. And as an employer I don't see it ending soon. There's a boom right now, for sure, and wages are up, but I heard that in 2000 too. There was a slightly drop for a year or 2, but it's been steady upwards movement since then.

Steady growth is fine. The growth is not steady as of late, things have spiked in short order.

Tech companies are making record profits, more and more of the economy is being digitized and automated… there’s been a tech gold rush in the pandemic, giving tech companies the ability to compensate better than they did before.

Yeah, there's clearly no barrier to tech companies paying a good amount more, and still being incredibly profitable. The stock conversation is not that expensive for faangs for free but if the stock keeps going up. It's making it harder for regular companies to hire tech workers.

Yes, but salaries are spiking in non-tech companies too, and they are not having record profits.

Someone can be quite happy with their jobs most days, be compensated at a historically very fair level, continue to get RSUs, etc. But, especially as a younger person or as someone with kids in school, etc. if Google comes along and says you can work remotely for 2x your current salary, that is really hard for most people to turn down.