Hiring gets a lot of attention, but pricing is vague there.<p>It is much easier to estimate the price of an already hired programmer with a track record known over years and who has knowhow of the company&#x27;s infrastructure, style, and knows the interactions between people and teams.<p>Also, it is usually easy to estimate how much it would cost to replace the well-known, skilled programmer with a new hire so I might assume that a careful owner or manager would be eager to re-evaluate his&#x2F;her price continuously and adjust their salary upwards regularly to basically re-hire the hired programmer, to re-establish the position over and over again.<p>But large or continuous salary increases are not that common. You generally have to change jobs to get a significant raise to your salary.<p>It seems to be companies are more careless and flimsy with spending money on new hires and more conservative and thrifty with spending money on their existing hires even if that behaviour is in direct opposition to the amount of betting they are required to do.