This is an incredibly important contributor to all of this. At a prior company, in order to be promoted from associate to senior staff, you had to demonstrate

This is an incredibly important contributor to all of this. At a prior company, in order to be promoted from associate to senior staff, you had to demonstrate and be evaluated performing at senior level while associate for a year. In order to get hired as a senior, you just talked with a hiring manager and an HR rep, checked off some boxes based on a few blurbs about what you did at prior jobs, and boom, you were a senior. Same thing with getting a raise. To get a raise to 150K (just as a randomly selected round number), it was an enormous bureaucratic process going up 5 levels of management that would take months with lots of aggravation - and unlikely to really pan out. To get hired at 150K for the same role, it was a couple phone calls with an HR rep and hiring manager - about 15 minutes in total.