[robbyking]

Not always.

My company offers market rate adjustments (outside of the usual review/salary adjustment periods) to retain experienced developers.

[celebdor]

How does such process work? What determines the market rate for the adjustments?

[refurb]

There are compensation consultants that many companies use to benchmark salaries. The same thing happened at my company, salaries went up quickly so they adjusted everyone. Before that new hires were getting higher salaries than people with more experience who had been there many years.

[kelukelugames]

Google famously did it many years ago. Microsoft did it a few years ago. Every engineer got a 10% raise.

[e12e]

Funny, after they'd entered into an agreement to fix the pay across (a substantial part of) the industry?

[serge2k]

IIRC Facebook didn't enter the agreement and Google was losing a lot of people.

Makes you wonder how much more we could be making.

[crazypyro]

No, that was only Steve Jobs and now that Steve Jobs is dead, there is no evil!

[asuffield]

The rate required to stop experienced developers from leaving. That's quite easy to measure. Enough of the people will leave will tell you what offer they got, and you adjust up until the rate of turnover is acceptably low.

[imaginenore]

From my experience, there's always a company willing to pay you more. If they see some company paying you X, they think your skills are worth at least X.

So your explanation doesn't really answer the question.