To make matters worse, university staff software engineering jobs usually pay 1/3 to 1/2 of comparable jobs in industry (even after excluding FAANG-level outlier salaries), and in most cases offer no meaningful career progression.
I think universities will never be able to compete for engineering talent until they can create attractive career paths for people who aren't professors.
Universities will never pay competitive salaries, because academic research is not supposed to create direct monetary value to the employer. An engineer does not create enough value in the academia to justify anything approaching a competitive industry salary.
It's also ethically difficult to advocate for higher salaries in the academia, if you are already living a comfortable middle-class life. The money would ultimately come from taxes and tuition fees. If you think that those should be increased, the money would be better spent on helping your colleagues who are earning poverty-level wages.
Engineering is a support role in the academia, because pure engineers don't teach or set research directions. Most labs and most departments are too small to employ more than a handful of engineers, if any. Only large research institutes have enough engineers working on similar topics to justify creating senior engineering roles.
I think universities will never be able to compete for engineering talent until they can create attractive career paths for people who aren't professors.