The Great Resignation gave the individuals so much negotiation and purchasing power for a brief period of time as Big Tech companies lost people left and right

The Great Resignation gave the individuals so much negotiation and purchasing power for a brief period of time as Big Tech companies lost people left and right to Web3 Crypto Unicorns (and other Unicorns in their dying gasps). Amazon, Microsoft, Google, all lost so many people because their systems weren't configured to be able to quickly keep up with the new market trends. But Big tech cos had 2 things could control: 1. Newhire offer bands could rise quicker than internal salaries. (Leading to resentment that newhires were getting insane offers that long-term employees could never get in a raise). Which led to a lowering of the bar across all levels in Big Tech to get those offers out. 2. Promotion bars could be lowered likewise. Neither was nefarious. Noone ever said at a high level leadership level "Lower the bar" (for either). But what did happen is that when great coworkers all around you are constantly leaving, the people remaining start to panic. They start to realize that that "almost senior" engineer who's "not quite there" and wouldn't have been promoted 6 months ago, will absolutely leave for a Senior title and a 30-50% salary bump if you don't promote him. (And still might if you do cuz you'll only give him a 15-20% salary raise). And suddenly, everyone starts "leaning in" to promotions. Likewise, on interview loops, when you've lost a bunch of folks and are desperate to replace your headcount to meet your goals, you start talking yourself into candidates that you wouldn't have taken risks on 6 months earlier. This is all basic human nature, and even experienced data-driven leaders will find themselves optimizing for different criteria and justifying it to themselves as thinking outside the box. I'm genuinely not judging, it's a reasonable and logical (albeit shortsighted) way to act under the circumstances. So now, that all of this is behind us, these companies are all sitting on hiring freeze, post-layoffs, and still with a bunch of folks that are overlevelled. An overcorrection is the only step forward. Lose even more folks because you now have to recalibrate their inflated sense of accomplishment or worse an overly optimistic sense of their opportunity ("Jeff got promoted and I'm way better than Jeff! So I should get promoted too." Yeah, Jeff wouldn't have been promoted in 2020 or 2023. So alas, too bad for you) I think to some degree this will happen across all Big Tech this year. But unlike during the great resignation, there's no more unicorns (Except Facebook) throwing insane offers at ex-Big Tech. I think things will go back to normal in 2024, for a definition of normal that is closer to 2014.