They could do that: hire juniors, lose money while you train them, and give them aggressive raises. Or they could just do what they are doing: skip the juniors and just hire the people who've got experience.

Everyone's kicking the can down the road and we're very soon going to hit points of "no one has experience (or are already working)". Someone needs to do the training. It doesn't seem like school and bootcamps is enough for what companies need these days.

People will remember this when they're more senior in their career.

The game theory here says that such a company will be outcompeted and killed by a company which doesn't spend money+time on retention and training but instead invests that money in poaching.

What you say only works if everyone is doing it. But if you're spending resources on juniors and raises, you can easily be outcompeted and outpoached by companies using that saved money to poach your best employees.

>but instead invests that money in poaching.

give a big enough raise and they won't want to be poached. You won't retain everyone, but your goal probably isn't to compete with Google to begin with. So why worry of the scenario of boosting a good junior from 100k to 150k but losing them to a 250k job?

In some ways you will also need to read the room. I don't like the mentality of "I won't hire this person, they are only here for money", but to some extent you need to gauge how much of them is mission-focused and how much would leave the minute they get a 10k counter-offer. adjust your investments accordingly and focus on making something that makes money off that.

What's the solution? Locking juniors in with contracts? Vesting cliffs?

Compete for talent. You can never compete with big tech salaries, and often you can't compete with their benefits either. But you can still compete in creative ways. The most obvious way that no one does is to promote people into lower hours worked; instead of a pay raise you give them every Friday off, for example. There are a lot of types of people out there motivated by a lot of different things than money.

Its the tragedy of the commons. These companies will think they are very smart for doing this, but theyll just foster a culture where there are no competent employees once the current seniors retire