I'm not sure it's a question of having top talent. What I see happening is that any given organization has a minimum acceptable level of skill and experience fo

I'm not sure it's a question of having top talent. What I see happening is that any given organization has a minimum acceptable level of skill and experience for developers in order to be acceptable for hire. There's no concept of "well we'll hire this kind of crappy person for the open job because that's all we can get". What remote work has done is to make the pool of available candidates that exceed the competence bar massively bigger. I have seen this play out in a medium sized SV tech start up -- they were able to staff up during the pandemic at a much higher rate because nobody cared where the candidates were located. This seems like a Rubicon that can't be un-crossed -- once you have a ton of people in Seattle and San Diego and on the east coast, and people who decided to move back to their home town in Kentucky, there's no going back to on-site folks who rode the bus in from Gilroy.