Does this mean that year over year people actually lose money to inflation if the only way to get an increase is with a job title change? That sounds pretty damn horrible to me.

That’s been the norm for most jobs forever. It’s why the average software job tenure has been ~2 years for over a decade. You only get an increase in salary by finding a new job where companies have to actually compete for talent(sans the past 2 years of this market).

Getting a new job is onerous in tech with how we interview and companies made the bet that they’d do better off not increasing their labor costs across their employee base and dealing with a higher per position recruitment cost for a smaller number of roles.