And they didn't take yours. I don't mean to be critical, but in my experience, when a company says they pay "market prices", they mean the market in their imagination instead of the real market. Maybe the offer wasn't big enough. There was some reason those candidates turned you down.
And sure, maybe you couldn't afford to make bigger offers. Not all businesses are viable. If I could hire labor for $0.50/hour I'd own a business, but I can't.
> emc/vmware
VMWare was in the news recently as cutting 900 jobs. Maybe they are hiring. In which case I expect we would find that expensive senior developers are being laid off and cheap new grads are being hired.