[iabacu]

A lot of people commented on the pay.

Most companies don’t have the option to offer more to the good engineers in the first place.

First, they don’t apply at all, and if they do, the company will probably fail to identify them as good.

And if they do identity the good engineer, then they will tend to offer below market (for the good engineer), and then lose out because of pay.

But it’s not because the company is necessarily cheap: it’s so rare to have a good engineer that they probably don’t even understand the value of one (or can’t make good use of them) in the first place, and therefore can’t justify the offers that the market is swinging at them.