There are a lot of ways to compete besides salary, but my experience is that companies paying below-market-rate salaries tend to be less competitive on other ax

There are a lot of ways to compete besides salary, but my experience is that companies paying below-market-rate salaries tend to be less competitive on other axes too—with the exception of fields like research that have no trouble attracting far more superb candidates than the field can take. In my experience, autonomy, impact, psychological safety, remote work and flexible hours can all make up for substantial differences in pay, and would make the team more productive to boot. These are all aspects of the job a company can directly control; I'm not even talking about things like prestige, "mission" or super-deep technical problems. And yet, it seems like these aspects are all positively correlated with pay: higher-paid positions also come with more respect and a better work experience. What's keeping companies from changing this? Trust and respect go a long way. Of course, everyone and their dog claims they have a great culture, so a team would need a way to show rather than tell, but that's an eminently solvable problem. I've seen this work first-hand. For the same level of pay, hiring people on a Haskell project was markedly easier than other projects at the same company: people actively want to use Haskell and it also acts as a real signal that the team is willing to do things differently. The latter might actually be more important!