Ages ago I had a slightly sad conversation with a manager in high tech mechanical engineering about this. We/they wanted good engineers but not enough to compet

Ages ago I had a slightly sad conversation with a manager in high tech mechanical engineering about this. We/they wanted good engineers but not enough to compete with the city over. Most of the expertise was very in-house, difficult to hire experienced people from other companies who would know the right things, so training up and retaining graduates was important. Hopefully that was a carefully reasoned choice. Employee compensation economics don't make much sense to me. There's some factor in favour of maximising headcount which argues for many people on low pay instead of few people on high pay. It's also considered _better_ to have your long term engineers occasionally notice the gap between their pay and the open market, leave, and then be replaced by new ones who cost what the open market predicted.