I think the benefits of working remotely are still poorly understood, and long-term the companies that are being built remote-first are going to have a significant engineering advantage over those that bolt remote working on after the fact.
Better to just pick and choose who you want to keep.
From the companies perspective, downsizing via changes on remote policy they spin a negative news headline into a positive ("Yahoo no longer allowing remote" vs "Yahoo lays off 2,000") and it is way lower risk in terms of labor law.
Obviously highly employable people will leave, but the company saves the risk of strike, lawsuits, bad press etc. that come with lay-offs.
So your argument is that the employees that choose to stay must be bad because there can not be other reasons for their decision but the limits of their career prospects? Even if that might be true to some degree, I'm afraid that if you use this logic to guide yourself it will someday backfire badly.
Doesn't matter. Failing public companies like IBM and Yahoo don't care about better vs. worse employees; what they care about is reducing costs, and that tends to make better employees more likely to be laid off, because they're more expensive. Wall Street doesn't give a damn how good your employees are; it just wants them to be cheap.
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
But cheaper if they pick themselves.
First, you have more layers of (mis)communication with remote since non-developer/engineering stakeholders won't be able to know whether their points and concepts are properly being understood by developers. Body language and tonality (voice inflection) are lost online. There are ways to minimize miscommunication through agile and lean processes but that needs to be in place before working with people remotely.
Second, tech companies might be known for having lavish office spaces so their employees want to be there. If their employees want to be there then it is easier to attract and retain them. On the other hand, bad egos can easily zap that synergy if not properly kept in check.
Attracting and keeping human capital is a very difficult problem not just in tech.
It is easier to do that if you are not fixed to the people in a 50km radius and can choose the cream of the crop of the world
We do Slack Audio/Video and Zoom when we need to get in touch and talk things through. That being said, the loggability and searchability of text conversations also resolves a lot of miscommunications.
Most companies that I worked for had this problem and only one of them was remote.
If your process is "Lets go to the devs and ask what I did wrong", you have big issues in your company independent of the location of their employees.
I would think you could just say "No, I was hired to work <here>. If you want me to relocate and I don't want to, you can let me go (which comes with unemployment, etc)". I certainly wouldn't voluntarily resign without compensation.