Now a critical project won’t happen on time, which will cost the company many magnitudes more in revenue than it would have cost them with a token increase.
Oops.
I got my friend a 30% raise after he quit, worked at a new place for two months, it blocked implementation of key projects and the CEO started freaking out.
I asked him how much he would pay to fix the problem, and he gave me a number. I said if we paid that as the new salary to my friend we could have him working there in a week.
The CEO made the call in front of me lol.
Others will flip this and say: "you need to retain 94% of your headcount every year."
The effect on salaries is more or less the same. If you know you need to keep employees, you give salary increases to the one's most at risk of leaving. If you know you need to let go of employees, you don't provide salary increases to the one's you want to get rid of.
Many companies don't have an attrition target at all, though.
And "small" is usually quite descriptive of managers.
So unless you manage to get a promotion to a senior IC position (like me), your compensation stagnates.
I’ve seen similar problems. Not wanting to give a raise to a critical person, and then having to replace them with 3 people. Not wanting to pay 10% more and ending up paying 300% more…
There's a meta-game that most sociopaths/narcs are playing like their lives depend on it to get their supply and climb the internal ladder, that's taking up so much energy/time/resources of the company, falling upwards
That there's nothing left to care about this sort of thing
Or I have a product that relies on certain hardware. I've already bought/leased that hardware, so I'm now paying depreciation/lease payments for that hardware. Every week I delay the launch I'm losing money on those payments because the hardware is sitting unused.
If your product isn't ready and your competitor's is, you lose contracts and possibly life time customers.
If it's v6.8 of your internal software product, no, the deadline doesn't usually matter that much. Maybe you are a bit behind your competition, but the only problem with just being at the 6.7 feature set a little longer is a small percentage of customers not sticking around. Your manager probably overpromised and underestimated, but aside from a bit of abuse and panic, you're right, it doesn't really matter.
But if you're one of 120 companies building parts for the 2025 F150 and your part isn't ready and the other 119 companies are ready, whether it's your supplier or you or your customer who is behind, you'd better believe that they've got you over a barrel in the contract. Like, the contract has a line that reads "for every minute of downtime after [date] you owe $25k". Your PM hopefully underpromised with an aim to overdeliver, but missed really bad. And all the checks and balances failed. If you've got adequate financials you can survive a miss once in a great while, but two or three in a row and even big shops will go under.
It's often important to understand the consequences of missed deadlines that your coworkers, vendors, or especially customers are accustomed to, people have wildly disparate experiences in this area.
Modernizing and moving functionality to the cloud now instead of in a few months prevents renewal of a expensive contract.