I don’t work in a sexy tech industry or for a company that software engineers are banging down the doors to come join. Our HQ is not in a desirable place to live.
If we say that we’ll only hire Software Engineers willing to live and work in our HQ office (which is the only office where we have our tech orgs), we take our available, interested pool of talent down to a tiny fraction of the workforce.
There are some great SEs in Des Moines, probably, who would be happy to WFH for us. But move to Houston? Non starter.
My 2 best devs currently work in California. They’ve been given a deadline by HR to move to Houston, even though I couldn’t care less. Guess who’s going to lose his best 2 devs because of a stupid RTO/WFH policy?
Its stupid, short sighted, lazy, illogical, counter productive, frustrating, and pointless.