[jrockway]

It does happen to people. In 2004, I worked at the University of Chicago making web apps for internal users, and got paid $45,000 a year. In 2017, I was a senior software engineer at Google making around $300,000 a year (that's salary + bonus + stock).

This is probably an anomaly because I was massively underpaid at my first job, but you've got to start somewhere. (The first three years of my career was basically job hopping. I started at UofC, went to a part of Doubleclick in Chicago, then went to a bank. UofC -> Performics doubled my salary. Bank -> Google doubled my salary.)

As for job hopping, you can have whatever weird criteria you want, but the average engineering tenure these days is about a year, so if you want someone who has 20 years of experience you probably shouldn't be surprised by 20 jobs. If you don't want people to leave to get more money, give them a raise. Why should people take less than market compensation because of your odd idea that they should be "loyal"? People stopped being loyal to companies in approximately 1950. The market for software engineers is ridiculously competitive on the buy side. That's just the reality.