Salaries and changing landscapes

Juliana Kaplan and Rebecca Knight, writing for Business Insider:

“Some of these companies were hoarding talent,” she told Insider. “And I think some have recognized that they were paying above-market value for people.”

I don’t know if there are any massive revelations in this article. It seems logical that as the job market has contracted a touch in tech, the offer packets are a little less rosy, but the quoted line above frustrated me so much that I wanted to write about it.

If companies were paying extremely large salaries and bonuses to attract talent, then almost by definition they were paying market value for a person with the skill set they required. Just cause they didn’t enjoy paying a particular salary, didn’t mean the market value was lower than that.