In my experience, being on a team with shrinking headcount due to difficulty hiring is not fun: - Quality gets cut before features. - Engineers are yanked and

In my experience, being on a team with shrinking headcount due to difficulty hiring is not fun: - Quality gets cut before features. - Engineers are yanked and shuffled from one urgent priority to another with no sense of ownership and no time for craftsmanship, leading to garbage codebases. - Mentorship and development fall by the wayside, making it even more important to get senior talent from outside, yet we still don't. - Management eventually spins up a team in a more favorable country, which leads to a lot of annoying off-hours videoconferencing at best, possibly even loss of status as the "center of gravity" for your area. - They company starts looking downmarket for labor, giving you less competent coworkers. - Higher pay is directly offset by higher likelihood of a layoff; you shuffle all the excess into your emergency fund just to maintain the same level of security.