>In my opinion, employers need to do more to significantly reward existing employees they want to retain. Right now, I can see how frustrating it could be for tenured employees when new hires come in with (quite a bit) higher comp packages than them, while they get a measly pay bump in accordance with inflation (sometimes even less).

This is literally what happened for me a few days ago

I've started as a student working for minimal wage, but I had some not small experience with C#, but I've still been around beginner level

After 3.5 years I've gained shitton of experience (that was smaller company, so you do everything from software, to deploy, to support, etc) and meanwhile I graduated and been arguing about software on the internet for years

but my compensation was around 130% of minimal wage <LOL>

I decided to quit and multiplied my salary by around 3.4 - 3.5 times

and meanwhile I told my friend who had like month or two experience with C# from college, that he should apply there, told him to learn about databases/sql and do some C# programming for like a month - so basically we have really newbie with little experience (let alone commercial) and he received like 140-150% of minimal wage

ridiculous, ain't it? but I'm happy with both outcomes :)