In my opinion, more experienced employee know more, can performance better, and most of companies can’t reach to their goals without hiring them, so they need to pay more for their not ignorable capacity. However, many jobs can be filled by either experienced people or by junior people. In my view, companies would rather to hire less experience employee because they can hire more people and pay less.
First of all, some jobs usually require very experienced people such as a system architect for a major soft ware task. On general, very senior engineers are paid almost twice that salary of a fresh-out engineer or more, and some companies prefer to hire very few senior engineer, preferring to have 3 junior engineer on the job rather than a single senior engineer assuming that all the engineers have the same capabilities except for experience, except for these position where a senior engineer is required.
Secondly, sometimes the salaries of senior engineers at a particular company to indeed reach value about their market place value, what happen to these people? If they are lucky, they are in a situation where they can’t be fired and they continue to be employed, reaping the benefits of a salary higher than market. However, I have known more them a handful of such case where the person is laid-off or cannot find new employment after their current project ended. Most of these people then retire, even though they would rather keep on working.
In conclusion, in many cases there is value in having multiple people with the same total cost compared to a single person, and they can work in supervise of just one experienced employee with higher amount of salary. So they can gradually the amount of the experience that they need.
TOEFL listening discussions: What will the secretary do next?