Money is actually a bigger deal than you think. A lot of people are in effect doubling their salaries by switching jobs right now.
Even rewinding to just 5 years ago, there were much fewer companies flush with cash. Now with the hyper-capitalization of so many up-and-coming startups, a lot more companies are now at the bidding table for the same pool of candidates. And even large incumbents have big plans to double in headcount, effectively making the tech market talent side constrained (it always has been to a large degree, but even more pronounced now). So now companies are largely competing on compensation packages, because the ball is very much in the candidate's court. Amazon is starting to pay up to ~$400k in total compensation for an L5 mid-level engineer due to retention and hiring issues, and it's commonly known within tech that Amazon has traditionally lagged behind other large companies in compensation.
Job seekers have options and are very much in a position of leverage. That is why it is hard to hire right now, because everyone needs to hire, and your company probably isn't paying as competitively as others.
In a certain kind of environment, maybe cool tech and loyalty could have been the tiebreaker for engineers in the job market, but it's very difficult to stare a 100% raise with similar WLB in the face and not think about making a move.
I mean, 100% raise for me would be unfathomable - that carries me over to five figures, which over here is high-end managerial compensation, definitely not something for a mediocre code monkey.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm mediocre, but I wouldn't pass a 'do you work with cool tech' (machine learning, crypto, iot, microservices?) or a leetcode test.
Even rewinding to just 5 years ago, there were much fewer companies flush with cash. Now with the hyper-capitalization of so many up-and-coming startups, a lot more companies are now at the bidding table for the same pool of candidates. And even large incumbents have big plans to double in headcount, effectively making the tech market talent side constrained (it always has been to a large degree, but even more pronounced now). So now companies are largely competing on compensation packages, because the ball is very much in the candidate's court. Amazon is starting to pay up to ~$400k in total compensation for an L5 mid-level engineer due to retention and hiring issues, and it's commonly known within tech that Amazon has traditionally lagged behind other large companies in compensation.
Job seekers have options and are very much in a position of leverage. That is why it is hard to hire right now, because everyone needs to hire, and your company probably isn't paying as competitively as others.