They can't do that easily though. If a company pays $100,000 in stock-based comp. that has no impact on their cashflows. You're effectively paying your employee

They can't do that easily though. If a company pays $100,000 in stock-based comp. that has no impact on their cashflows. You're effectively paying your employees with investment capital which is great if you have a hyped public stock. If you start paying all your engineers in cash suddenly your operating margins will drop and investors will get nervous that you're going to run out of cash. Imo there are a large number of unprofitable public tech companies today that rely almost entirely on their stock price remaining high to sustain their engineering costs. Instead of higher base pay, layoffs are far far more likely. Many of these companies simply don't have the cashflows to pay their engineering teams in cash.