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Maybe you have reversed causality here? H1bs can be kept on payroll without having to offer them anything more, you can keep salaries down with no complaints. Americans who learn new skills and gain more experience want to increase their earnings, but companies don't invest in wage growth so people have learned you need to jump ship regularly to keep earning. This is not just an American software thing either, across the Western world salaried employees seem to have learned the lesson that you need to change jobs every 2-4 years to actually make serious progress in earnings
You're not taking into account that these people aren't learning new skills on their own, it's due to the hedge fund's efforts and support that they learn stuff. And how do they repay this generosity (remember, the hedge fund could just have summarily dismissed them which based on "these people have no idea how a domain controller works" basically seems like the right decision)? They leave as soon as they have new skills so they can go off and be mediocre in another higher paying job.
Solved problem. Given them a long contract based on completion of the training.
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I owe absolutely nothing to a hedge fund. Less than nothing. They are perfectly unloyal to me and me to them. In this maximally mercenary relationship they will pay me enough to stay or they won't. And if they think employing me is a bad deal then they'll fire and my whole department without a care.
The above is not hypothetical. I worked for a company that was purchased. Not by a hedge fund but by a larger company. After my new stock vested I bailed within a few weeks. They made the vesting period too short and I got a lot a lot of it in a year. Later they fired most of my department since the company wasn't profitable enough and I worked for R&D which was first on the chopping block. Our lack of loyalty to each other was so well balanced.
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It's not generosity, it is a business decision. The chances are these smaller shops have got some kind of weird IT kludge mess of stuff going on that only the people running it know how it works. You could fire them and bring someone else in but then they have to untangle someone else's work, which will take time, and money. Training someone isn't that expensive and allows you to hit the ground running from day 1.
That some of the employees will then leverage that training into a better job is just the cost of doing business. It's not a friendship it's a transactional relationship. The hedge fund wasn't providing training out of the goodness of their heart it was based upon the cost/benefit. They got 6 months of time where the IT person was keeping everything running, presumably starting to apply their new skills. The employee owes them nothing beyond the work they were paid for. And if the hedge fund can get someone else in for less than the IT person would stay for later it's a win win. They got through the transition period (which is the toughest part with all new IT staff, when assimilating a new company/branch) successfully.
Successful hedge funds aren't stupid, if they are using this model it is because in general it is maximizing the chances of success.
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Alternatively the hedge fund could actually choose to buy up companies with employees who do know how a domain controller works.
Those companies tend to be well run and thus more likely to be profitable and likely to be correctly valued. There's nowhere near as much alpha in buying up a company like that.
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And the flip side of this is that as soon as a worker is negative EV or whatever the appropriate metric is, they're liable to be laid off. This is just the equilibrium where neither party can trust the other and there is at will employment. I imagine economists like it and would say that the employee who moves and gets a raise or a company laying off unproductive workers is more efficient, and what do I know, maybe they're right.
I was chatting with a Japanese employee of a large company with offices in both Japan and the US. He says that rather than layoffs, they get put on 'career improvement plans.' In his case, it involved completely retraining his specialty and moving his family to the US, but he kept his job and stayed at the same company. We could probably have this situation if we wanted, but I'm unsure it's actually superior.
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