Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away (opens in new tab)

> There aren’t that many opportunities for people these days, especially at the senior level where titles and compensation is still inflated due to 2020-2022 grants.

You are joking, right? Apple, SpaceX and Microsoft are not the only game in town.

They may have retired. Past a certain point you are in it because you love it, and if you no longer love it, there are better things in life than gilding the lily of a nest egg.

SpaceX is well-known for low salaries.

> It provides real, non-negligible value to sit in the same room as your coworkers

Please cite a reputable source for this unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable claim. eg: to me it provides a negative value (commute, noise, lack of my cat). To my employer it also provides negative value: my lower productivity, my much higher chance to GTFO to a more sane workplace.

I can and do communicate with my coworkers over slack and zoom just fine. As my job does not require touching them, no problems are created by this arrangement.

If you want to have people go to the office you need to pay them for the time to commute to that office. There is negative value to requiring people be in the office, especially given all these companies have opted for open plan BS - every study ever performed has found open and “shared” office plans reduce productivity, reduce collaboration, reduce morale, and increase disease.

The value businesses get from putting employees in the same room is making it harder to go elsewhere (creating a fake “family”), and managers get to feel like they have control and ownership of their plebs.

There are also people who use office life as surrogate social lives, and they seem to be the employees they were most in favour of mandatory RTO - “I can’t deal with not having a forcefully created social environment, so I’m going to demand that everyone come back”

Not yet. Meta is currently offering hardly any COLA while demanding RTO. Fuck 'em and the horse they rode in on.

Why would they have to live in downtown LA?

They reportedly have an RTO mandate for all employees. Managers can override the mandate, and can withdraw their approval forcing them back to the RTO mandate default.

I expect driving senior talent away is part of the strategy - the senior talent demands the highest compensation, which is what these employers are combatting industry-wide and in coordination. They want to hire them back at lower wages later on.

If we read the article instead of just the headline, we see that it makes clear that Microsoft has a hybrid arrangement, and that said hybrid arrangement has still resulted in a loss of employees.

>Microsoft, which also enacted a hybrid RTO approach, saw a decline of 5 percentage points.

Qualified yes. Unions are one leg to ensure fair treatment of workers in the long-term, but are ultimately a half-measure to address the perpetual conflict with unreasonable adversaries, e.g., corporate owners. What is needed for knowledge workers like SWEs, SREs, etc. is to band together as worker-owned co-ops to ensure the stability of morale and products/services, vigilant ethics and excellence in products/services, and fairness in profit sharing based on a thoughtful characterization of and measurement of total performance.

It should look something like: hiring should be slow, retention should be longer-than-average, morale should be excellent (inc. devoid of toxic negativity and toxic positivity), and the burden of leadership undertaken by preselection coupled with sortition and a governance body comprised of representative workers.

These employers are certainly coordinating on wages, RTO policy, etc. They do it via third party compensation research firms. It's suspicious that people downvote your suggestion that workers also coordinate.

No.