The "why" is because people quit environments that are toxic, but hold out if there are signs of improvement. People don't want to quit - it's a large investmen

The "why" is because people quit environments that are toxic, but hold out if there are signs of improvement. People don't want to quit - it's a large investment of time and investment to job hunt. It's annoying as hell. So if you can string together promises: - We'll hire more people, it's just so hard to find candidates! - We're doing bonuses right after evaluations, but we're doing a new evaluation system that's taking a bit longer than we expected this year - We're just finalizing talking to a customer we'll have them signed next month, we swear That delays people looking, delays that large investment, and you can extract engineering time with little investment. If you ran a company that couldn't afford another engineer for a team that desperately needed another engineer, are you going to paint the bleak picture for your team and risk losing those engineers that you have, or lie? If you have morals and say you'd be upfront, great; but that's unfortunately not a universal answer.