alt Hacker NewsEngineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.
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I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow organically. They decided that was no longer going to be the deal. So they got the current system. There was never some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event every few years just to keep up with inflation.
This is only because companies don't want to raise salaries as engineers' skill levels increase. If companies put junior employees in higher salary bands as their skill levels increase there wouldn't be a problem.
If incentives to stay outweighed leaving, people would stay.
This is merely the result of the incentive structure of corporations, which make it far more lucrative to switch jobs rather than stay at one company.
Or the company could recognize the dangers of salary compression and inversion and pay developers at market rates
“Engineers did this to themselves…”
Long, long ago, the compact was that employees worked hard for a company for a long time, and were rewarded with pensions and opportunities for career advancement. If you take away the pensions and take away the opportunities for career advancement, your employees will advance their careers by switching companies—and the reason that this works so well is because all of the other companies would rather pay more to hire a senior engineer rather than take a risk on a junior.
It’s a systemic problem and not something that you can blame on employees. Not without skipping over a long list of other contributing factors, at least.