> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like.

Right... the alternative is to let the senior engineer go, some work gets reshuffled a bit between other senior engineers, and lowest-priority work is delayed until they hire a new senior engineer.

It's not that the company is held hostage by the senior engineer, sheesh.

> you don’t have options. You pay the 40%, or you lose the person and spend six months (and a recruiter’s fee) trying to find a replacement at market rate, which is probably even higher.

Huh? A replacement engineer is "probably" even more than 140% of what you're currently paying? Then your company has a whole other problem which is that it is criminally underpaying its engineers.

Nothing about this post makes any sense. It's not how companies, employees, or the labor market work.

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woeirua 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s not how companies work today, but it could be how companies operate in the future. Imagine a situation where single engineers manage a fleet of agents and own entire systems. This is already happening. If that engineer leaves then it’s game over for that system.

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crazygringo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a basic part of management that you never let any individual employee become irreplaceable. Remember, people get sick and go on vacation too. Managers are always supposed to make sure that tasks and responsibilities can be picked up by someone else.

And the AI that is making it easier for engineers to handle so much more engineering, also makes it easier for a new engineer to take over. They literally just sit down and prompt the AI to start explaining how the current system is set up.

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woeirua an hour ago | parent [-]

You would hope so, but yet… a lot of people are getting their teams to reap cost savings.

	▲	crazygringo 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Making sure that no employee is irreplaceable doesn't really have much to do with cost savings. It's just about how you assign work, rotate what people work on, code reviews are a part of it, etc. None of this has anything to do with AI. If anything, the way that best practices around AI involve lots of design documents, tests, markdown, etc. can actually make it much easier for a new employee to continue where a previous employee left off.