Why don’t tech companies pay engineers more to stay? The top companies for engineers are transparent and they pay attention to an engineer's salary. Ethena

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Tech companies often lose talented engineers due to inadequate compensation structures that fail to recognize tenure and impact. The author discusses the need for transparent, impact-based compensation models that reward long-standing employees appropriately. At Ethena, plans are underway to implement such a structure to foster long-term employee retention.

Why don’t tech companies pay engineers more to stay?

Why don’t companies pay engineers more?

Paying engineers more is easier said than done…

So, what’s the plan for compensating engineers?

In my past, I always searched for a stable job where I could just be happy, bring value and stay until I grow old.
Now I have switched jobs 5 times in the last 10 years and while these changes were not easy (I like most of my colleagues and I try to keep in contact with a lot of them) they always had a very nice impact on my salary. 
At one of my last jobs, I was made a counter-offer in response to my resignation, which clearly exceeded the generous offer made by my recruiter. 
Of course, it would have been stupid to accept it, but it was tempting at the time.
The main reason for my resignation there was mainly the way they treated the employees - especially the long-term ones. If it would have only been the salary, it could have worked.
Usually, there is a reasoning behind everything, so I asked managers what they think about this and they gave me two reasons:
1.: The budget for new hires is usually significantly higher than that for salary increases. They only had the budget for raising the salaries for each individual by about 4%/year. So they either had to stick with that, or only raise it for the high-performers and not raise for anyone else. 
I don’t think that this answer was really honest, because that’s something that the managers should be able to negotiate with their higher-ups. And this came from the guy who later made the previously mentioned counter-offer.
2.: Bringing new people in is seen as more valuable, because they bring fresh perspectives and ideas, sometimes also inside-knowledge of competitors. 
While that my be true in general that bringing in new perspectives like this is good, it is often overlooked how important it is to know about the insides of your own business. The more complex it gets, the more important that knowledge is and the harder it gets to obtain for any new employee. 
To have new knowledge coming in from the outside is definitely good to have, but you should never lose a employee that’s already very valuable for the company for that.
I think the ideas in the article about having more transparency and a value-based compensation are good. 
They are not easy to implement, though.
It’s not always easy to see the value an employee brings. There are people who can look really good “on paper”, have a lot of Git commits and updates in Jira, but they actually bring little value and may even block other from their work.
Other have very little activities in the statistics, but they jump around, help other with their tasks, listen and solve their problems and increase the overall productivity and mental health of the employees by double-digits.
So any program that involves value-based compensation probably only works really good if there is really a lot of transparency and communication with the team, where each inidividual has to not just only talk about themselves, but also about their colleagues.

This was a very insightful read.
Thank you