No idea if this any interesting, but I feel baffled. I work in a big IT company the one that is famous for their data bases. We had a kind of specific product that has 2 full time developers. One of them has been coding the product since day 1. The other one is a recent hire (15 months) and is still catching up. Worth to mention that this is a product that is sold, so not freebie. I'm plus another 10 guys are in charge of the support for this product, basically try to fix whatever the customer is facing and if everything fails open a bug with our developers.
Long story short our developer star (IC5 if you know what I'm talking about) asked the product owner for a 6% salary increase just to cover inflation, he was denied in the sport saying there was no budget. A few weeks later he got an offer to work at Meta, no idea of how much was the salary increase, but I believe it was A LOT, plus a lot of stock. Obviously we all went into full panic mode because obvious reasons. Product owner tried to retain him but well, he was far for even been close to match Meta's offer. Know we don't have a developer that knows how things actually work, we have a lot of very upset customers, the team became a cespool where we became from a 'above the line culture' to a point fingers everywhere. What is worst the sole developer is asking to be moved of project and my best guess is he is looking a new place too.