This sounds like a biased article. First of, this increased compensation is only being offered to a few upper level employees. May be they are trying to prevent

This sounds like a biased article. First of, this increased compensation is only being offered to a few upper level employees. May be they are trying to prevent those execs from jumping ship to competitors like Meta and Apple. Only FAANG companies have been doing similar things to prevent churn. Also, normal software engineers at Google are not lowly paid. In fact, all FAANG salaries are in the top quintile in the bay. In fact, at many of these tech companies, it is easy to hire at junior level because there is a lot of talent applying (unless you are hiring to fire) but harder to retain at the top level