People generally have this expectation that companies are just made out of money and greedily keeping it all for "themselves", whoever "themselves" may be, but in the real world, a company that makes a 5% profit margin is doing pretty well and a 10% profit margin is amazing. Being in the tech industry can really skew your perception of profit margins because we are in one of the handful of odd industries where that would be mediocre.

Having to proactively raise salaries 10% across the board can easily be the difference between profit and loss for a year. Raising a salary for one person is easy. Raising it across thousands and thousands is not.

It is very difficult for a company to look ahead and say "Hey, maybe inflation is going to be 10% this year so we should raise salaries by a huge amount", especially when all the official numbers are themselves much smaller than that. It was literally only three months ago the Fed was promising up and down that inflation was only going to be transitory. I didn't believe them for a second, but I'm observably faaaar more cynical about governments telling the truth than the average businessperson, and for that matter, the average HN denizen. (At the time, the modal HN position at least by comment posts was indeed that the Fed was correct and anyone who questioned otherwise was wrong at best and possibly a conspiracy theorist.) Do you seriously expect companies to be second-guessing every official news source about inflation?

"Raising a salary for one person is easy"

Not raising a salary for one person is even easier.

I'm referring to this ancient concept of solidarity. If your workers are struggling, you don't reward yourself. You struggle with them. In fact, as CEO you should take a pay CUT, because you're the one that can afford it.

It's pathetic how we normalized executives robbing companies, we truly are morally bankrupt and even defend the behavior.

Calling it "easy" is not "defending" it.

You can't think clearly about situations if you're just firing emotions off at trigger words.

I can think perfectly clearly about executives rewarding themselves in dire times. Both rationally and emotionally.

My point, if you considered it angry, wasn't directed at your personally.

Instead of doing 10% raises across the board, companies should do raises bottom up and use dollar amounts instead of percentages. 10% of 50k is way less than 10% of 400k, it's not a "fair" raise.