Any days defeats much of the purpose IMHO, which is to allow people to escape the real estate cost trap cities and actually build wealth.

If a company said I had to move back to a high cost city, I’d demand like double the salary. Not like I’d be keeping any of it. They should just skip the middleman and cut checks directly to existing homeowners and property speculators.

It helps on both sides too. If a bunch of devs can now vacate the high cost cities, it might make those cities less expensive for the people who actually need to be there or have family ties there.

If you believe in fully remote work, and think that companies should not pay double to have employees in HCOL locations: why would you hire in a crazily expensive market like the US in the first place?

If everyone is remote, why not put your employees in Costa Rica? Or São Paulo? Colombia? Heck, even Canada is cheaper than many places in the US.

And we're only talking about timezone-aligned markets. You can also consider Poland, or India, and now you can hire a lot more resources for the same cost. Sure, it will be less efficient, collaboration tax and all, but 2.5X is quite a difference.

The one thing holding US-based companies from going all-in offshore is the belief that in-person relationships still matter. They would rather pay the extra COL mark up than save 40-70% for a remote employee.

To be clear: the jobs are going to other markets; this is not a either or situation. But at least hybrid RTO has as a dampening effect, and protects the internal job market. We should be celebrating folks like Amazon, not complaining that they don't get it.

In the past we had more demand than supply, which kept salaries stable (read: high). Now there's more supply than demand, and the main thing holding salaries stable is that employers still want warm bodies walking through their doors every day. Remove that, and you get a race to the bottom.

The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.

I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”

It's quiet layoffs. You agreed to be in their city any time they want in the contract, but you signed it anyway despite the pay being less than the rent in that city. Now you're being called in, you're quitting, so it's technically not a layoff.

I wonder what the relative fraction of those doing software development that also have to touch hardware is.