[Alex3917]

> How is it not in the companies best interests to just keep you on and give you a raise?

Better to be less profitable than bankrupt due to lack of cashflow. Mark Zuckerberg would have been a great hire for any company even at a salary of a billion dollars a year, but any startup that hired him for that salary would immediately go bankrupt.

[kraftman]

This is assuming that they hire someone else to replace you, which is usually the case, so they're only saving a couple of months of salary, but now they have less staff developing the product, the staff they have are busy doing interviews, and they then have to pay a recruiter fee.