You see, the problem with "good, ambitious people" is they want to (1) keep learning new things, (2) work on projects that expand their expertise, (3) continue on a monotonously increasing career trajectory. Sadly 85% of the coding out there is more like "IT" and keeping the lights on, fixing the CRUD apps, etc. Ambitious people are a major flight risk at such companies, and worse, they might bring in some new tech or complicated patterns that the drones that replace them don't understand, and then the firm has to chuck that code and go back to the former, easier to understand but far less performant code. I've seen it happen several times.
"The thing about this place... Everyone with get-up-and-go has already got up and gone"
Some time later, he honestly told me: "The only way they would give you a raise is to prevent you from leaving. At that point, if you already went through the trouble of getting another offer, you might as well leave." Several months later, I did. Money wasn't the only factor -- the big new project I was hired for got finished -- but it was a major one, they were underpaying me pretty badly.
I worked for a major institution's engineering group where we formally asked "We're getting recruited all the time for more, will you raise comp to market to prevent people leaving?" Answer, "No." Annual attrition was 25%. At a recruiting/replacement cost of ~$40K, raises would have made more sense, but then managers would have failed to wield their power to "constrain their budget."
Logic need not apply.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html
Basically he points out that heavy use of methodology will get you guaranteed results. But that result is of very mediocre quality.
Do the good ambitious people never realize that they won't actually accomplish anything worthwhile if they never stick around more than a year or two?
It's not that you achieve nothing in a year tenure, but can you really accomplish anything great? Can you think of any good examples of people who showed up January 1st, changed the world, and left by Christmas?
50 Cent Talks Bitcoin: 'All Money Is Money' | | Observer
observer.com/2014/12/50-cent-talks-bitcoin-all-money-is-money/
Dec 22, 2014 - 50 Cent is happy he took Bitcoin for his album
Animal Instinct, because "all money is money."
EDIT: A previous boss of mine was unhappy I was quitting, and apologized that he couldn't give me $40k in cash to stay for another year. Me leaving meant they needed to search for a new, qualified person, and then spend the time training them, which was certainly close to $40k of time-money. Unfortunately, upper management didn't care.