They don’t even care about profit! It’s well documented that having long-tenured employees saves you money in a ton of ways (the tangibles are: recruiter fees, ramp-up time, higher pay for new hires… and the intangibles are all the hidden work or keep things running smoothly, building relationships between teams or departments, and innovation). But individuals have to quit to get a market-rate job, and the company ends up paying out the nose for someone new.

They in fact care about control more than they care about profit. I mean control over non-shareholders, including employees and customers, as part of an implied goal of any organisation, control over non-members.

It's all just a sado maso power game.

I saw an article on HN a while back that showed the math for "senior" employees was affected by the amount of profit generated off them.

I think that it was pitched at sales, but maybe could be applied to ENG.

The thinking was - if you have X sized market, you price in Y for your staff and you take Z for the profit - as the price of your staff increase, if the size of the market, or your share of it, does not increase, your profit decreases.

So it makes sense (the article argued) to drop the senior staff, and bring in the lower paid, but almost as good, intermediates - the profit stays the same.