It is not just about paying more (although that is one tactic). There are so many other factors though that affect hiring and attracting developers to the work you have at your company:
* Company size
* Is it green-field or mostly legacy?
* Is it new tech / new platforms or more conventional (Java and C#)?
* Will the company allow you to work remotely, maybe even on your own terms?
* Benefits, time off, usual suspects apply. Are they crappy or really good?
It's safe to say that a lot of developers who might already have some of these things in place really don't care to move or change jobs for an extra $10K, $15K, or even $20K a year more. For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year. So ... shrug.
> There are so many other factors though that affect hiring and attracting developers to the work you have at your company
Sure, and some of them count as "compensation" in the broad sense. For example, if the company is willing to give me more paid time off, then that's equivalent to higher pay.
Some of the other factors you mentioned (such as whether it's "green-field") aren't compensation and can't be adjusted to attract candidates.
Pay is relatively easy to adjust, so it's an easy and fairly general answer to the complex problem of recruiting and retaining engineers.
> For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year.
I've seen developers change their choice of an offer based on $15-20k. It may not seem like a lot to you, but it's important for many people, and I totally respect that.
My comment more broadly was not just about pay, but about the attitude that "developer shortage" is going to be solved by sticks (pressuring developers to be more productive, aggressive outsourcing), rather than carrots (better pay, benefits, work environment, etc.)
The industry's fondness of trying to beat down engineer comp with sticks for decades (how many times was the outsourcing boogeyman paraded?) is the reason for the current predicament.
People looked at all the "outsource all the things!!1" articles on "CIO Today" and decided programming ain't for them 10 years ago. That's why we lack senior engineers now.
Solution for the problem? According to the article, it's more sticks!
I would leave my job in a second for 5k more a year. Admittedly I currently make less than 100k but that 5k more is 5k more money towards securing my family financially.
Yeah, folks tend to forget that not all engineers are in their early 20s, making $150k and content to live with roommates for the next decade (and possibly the rest of their lives).
Speaking of salaries being before tax, in Australia for example you'd only see 63 cents in the dollar out of that 5k (assuming a salary of $80k a year, probably not unreasonable for a lot of Australian developers). Might you also consider extra time off? I've done this before, and at one place ended up negotiating 1 day off every second week instead of a pay rise; I still, more or less, got just as much work done in 9 days as 10, and neither I nor the company had to fork over more money to the government. Not to mention, a long weekend every second weekend was great for relaxation and opened up possibilities for my wife and I to travel slightly further afield than we could for a standard length weekend.
Paying more is the one real way to keep good software devs. Everything else is secondary. The real problem is every companay big or small is under risk of getting vanished. So software devs are looking the jobs like a sprint and not a marathon. Don't get this wrong, improving the skills and learning new languages are constantly practised by good devs but money is the real motive to stay.
Well, for a developer earning over 100K in San Francisco, an additional $20K won't make a difference. Those devs will still be able to eat as much $12 avocado toast as they want, and they still won't have any hope of buying a house and raising a family. Offering over $100k in a different housing market would make a big difference, though.
