>I think stability with known lower pay is a stronger motivation for some folks.
And there's sometimes this baked in assumption that you can call a recruiter on Monday and end up with three $300-400K offers by the following Monday. Which may be true for some people with very in-demand specific skills. But is utter fantasy for people in more specialized roles, older, etc. who actually are making a comfortable amount of money and like where they are. Why take a jump they don't really need to just for some extra cash?
> And there's sometimes this baked in assumption that you can call a recruiter on Monday and end up with three $300-400K offers by the following Monday
I have never had this illusion, but I think my wife has had that idea (for me, not for her), and I had to disabuse her of that notion :) We're not in a terribly HCOL area to begin with, nor in a major tech hub, so... traditional w2 9-5 jobs, even in tech, are, for most senior folks I know, topping out in the mid $100s. If you want to count 401k/insurance/etc in total comp, you're still generally going to be under $200k (probably even fully loaded cost). Not so say there aren't any higher paying jobs, but they're relatively limited, and are going to have higher competition, etc.
And there's sometimes this baked in assumption that you can call a recruiter on Monday and end up with three $300-400K offers by the following Monday. Which may be true for some people with very in-demand specific skills. But is utter fantasy for people in more specialized roles, older, etc. who actually are making a comfortable amount of money and like where they are. Why take a jump they don't really need to just for some extra cash?