Yep, happened exactly this way at my last job. I was ridiculously underpaid, and I was attempting to negotiate about a month before pay reviews and was told to wait. My intentions were clear though.
The mandate came down - 3% for everyone more or less. I argued, and was politely shot down. Three weeks later I had a new job offer at a competitor I really wanted to work for. My current employer asked me how much it'd take to stay - "no dollar amount would keep me". I'm actually interested now how much they were willing to offer as a counter though.
New company has been really great with annual rises in the vicinity of about $10k.
Paying an employee enough to keep him from leaving, before he declares that he's leaving, could be seen as a form of early optimization.
We don't like early optimization, for good reasons. "They" probably don't like it either, for similar reasons. No reason to fix the employee machine if it isn't making noise.
The point was that he did make noise (albeit softly), and his noise went unheard. If you express your honest concerns, and those concerns fall on deaf ears, you'll know that your input won't matter in the future either.
Machine analogy doesn't work here, because machines don't understand human psychology.
The mandate came down - 3% for everyone more or less. I argued, and was politely shot down. Three weeks later I had a new job offer at a competitor I really wanted to work for. My current employer asked me how much it'd take to stay - "no dollar amount would keep me". I'm actually interested now how much they were willing to offer as a counter though.
New company has been really great with annual rises in the vicinity of about $10k.