I once worked at a startup where the company gave an "across the board" 10% raise to the engineering team in a way that caused 3 key people to leave. Essential

I once worked at a startup where the company gave an "across the board" 10% raise to the engineering team in a way that caused 3 key people to leave. Essentially in a company meeting that reviews were being delayed for 3 months because of how crazy things were but there was an across the board raise of 10% to make us competitive. The catch, the raises took effect immediately but would not be paid until reviews were done, then everybody would get a lump sum catch up payment along with any increases from the raise. The meeting dissolved into a huge mess where engineers kept asking "Why not give us the 10% raise now" and the VP Engineering got increasingly irate at the ingratitude without ever adequately explaining the delay. I went after the meeting and asked the CFO what the hell was going on. Basically, changing all of payroll was a pain in the ass, had a fee of $25 per headcount, and it was going to take a week for our overworked accounting department to accomplish. So they didn't want to take the hit in accounting twice in such a short period of time. I went back and explained it to my team and things were all better. Reasonable, and if the VP had just said that, all the engineers would have nodded and said "Good thinking!" but the damage had been done. 2 key developers resigned that same day and one two days later. There are people in this industry who can send emails to their network and get a new, good job in the space of an afternoon. Don't do stupid crap to them.