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

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. That's my anecdata.