I have not searched for a new job for a long time so I have
little feel for what the job market it these days.
I do know that many companies have let devs go for various excuses.
We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back
in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity.
Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it
thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.
Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions
on working from home?
They creep it up. Like frog in boiling water, not much to be done. 1 day a week with 1 optional day for the social butterflies. 2 days mandatory with 1 day optional for social butterflies. 3 days mandatories + some extra mandatory days like all hands and Q-end. Next up is 5 days mandatory with 2 optional days for social butterflies.
During COVID WFH peak I naively thought that the government, especially the EU, will take the growth of remote working as an opportunity for its Green Deal the bureaucrats love so much talking about. It started falling apart quickly when they started subsidizing restaurants, albeit that was the national government prerogative.
To this day I still wonder why there are no parties that tout this as part of their election programs. It's the way to reduce pollution and stimulate less-populated regions which have been dwindling as cities have been growing and getting so expensive.
That might work for an organisation that only recently implemented remote work so has a great deal of their staff anyway in the same city as HQ. For fully remote workers there's no creeping. I live thousands of kilometres from my office, there's no practical difference for me between a day a week in office or full RTO.
My past 2 jobs have been a big Bay Area unicorn "startup", and a small real startup. I'm remote because I grew up and live in BFE, USA.
My take on remote work is that bigcos with big names can broadly do whatever they want and still get headcount because people want the name on their resume and their stock (mostly still privately held!) in their portfolios. So they can jerk people around in a million ways, one of which is RTO, and still hire. They obviously make exceptions where it would really hurt them wrt high level roles.
Meanwhile, literally everyone else has to be flexible or they're either not going to get applications, or the adverse selection of no-remote-work makes the candidates who do apply such worse quality that hiring takes forever.
My current company tried this. Our owner (no kids or spouse) wants people in office with him so he can keep pretending it's the good old days. It's somewhat well-intended in that all it means is we started posting dual job posts and/or started posting them for SF first, then opening to remote if we didn't get any SF apps of sufficient quality. That was almost a year ago now. Despite this, we've made exactly one hire in SF within commuting distance and they didn't even apply into that position and don't have any RTO in their contract. The other 10ish HC we've added have all been remote, despite these efforts.
I also know of a different tech SMB I worked for long ago and still have contacts in. They don't offer remote at all (boomer owner). The business has essentially failed, they can hardly hire and cannot retain, and they're only kept afloat because the owner is extremely rich off the efforts of the prior non-owner CEO who he ousted to come back and ruin everything.
We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity. Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.
Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions on working from home?