[ghshephard]

It's actually a good question - I have a friend who is a technical recruiter, and she specializes in hiring entire departments from other companies. Her strategy is usually to offer a "leader" (quite often the manager, but sometimes the sr. technical player) who will take a role in convincing the others to come on board. Signing bonuses are usually around $200K-$500K depending on seniority, and vest (or the repayment portion disappears) after 2 years. The person responsible for convincing the others to come on board usually gets an additional $500K or so.

But, this is for departments of 6-10 people.

One reason why offering a higher salary is a non-starter, is that, in order to properly level those new employees, you end up having to pay all of your existing engineers more money as well. So, if you increase your existing engineers salary by $30K * 10,000 engineers, you just paid $300 million/year as opposed to paying a one time fee of $70mm.