> At what point does the candidate pool simply run out of experienced people for these companies to hire? There's always going to be new grads and junior engineers entering the market, ready to sacrifice the prime years of their lives for the good of the company, but the demand for experienced engineers and other staff has never been higher. Where are they finding these people that aren't aware of the toxic work environment? Or are they aware and that fat TC is just too great to ignore?
There are a fair number of people out there who are either not careful or who think that somehow "things will be different for them" (e.g. assume they're some better-than-average person who can make it work, and that most of the horror stories are from people who just weren't as good as they are).
> I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
There a lot of things that work well until they suddenly don't. Maybe they're falsely reassured that since it hadn't caught up to them yet, so it won't catch up with them ever. Sort of like people who believe in technological progress, know about a lot of cases where technology pulled a rabbit out of a hat and saved the day (e.g. the Green Revolution [1]), so downplay alarm over threats as insufficiently optimistic because they assume a rabbit will be found in a new hat before the threat manifests itself.
Also, a company culture can be extremely difficult to change once it's established itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution