Thankfully after many generations of human interactions and complex analysis of group dynamics, we've found a solution. It's called 'don't be an asshole' and 'pay people competitively'.

edit: because people are stupid, 'competitively' in this sense isn't some theoretical number pulled from an average, it's 'does this person feel better off financially working with you than others around them who don't work with you, and is is this person meeting their own personal financial goals through working with you'?

The common corporate policy of making it harder to give raises than to increase starting salaries for new hires is insane.

Is it insane? Makes perfect sense. Employee has way less leverage at raise time. It’s all about leverage. It sucks, but that is the reality

The elephant in this particular room is that there are a tiny handful of employers that have so much money that they can and do just pay whatever amount is more than any of their competitors can possibly afford.

That shouldn't be a big deal since they're a finite portion of the market. You should have a robust enough model to handle people leaving, including unavoidable scenarios like retirement and death.

They do have a point. Why waste a time on person who will always need more money over time, rather than invest in AI? Not only you don’t need to please every hire, your seniors will be more thankful too, because they will get linearly faster with time.

Outside of working for Antropic etc., there's no way you can make an LLM better at anything. You can train a junior though.

You absolutely can. It's a skill like operating IDE, CLI, etc.

Junior is a person, not your personal assistant like LLM.

You can def provide better context etc.

The person paying and the one responsible for coaching others usually aren't same

Mentor usually has no power over the compensation for the mentee.

Also it is never a policy to pay competitively for the existing employees, only for the new hires.

That's not a bad thing. It means you've added one more senior to the societal pool. A lot of the talent problems today are due to companies not wanting to train and focusing on cheap shortcut options like outsourcing or H1B