The tech recession is going to be great for Apple's back to the office plans.
VC will follow the public markets, as it always does. Valuations will tank and funding will dry up.
Not to mention inflation and low unemployment numbers. even if what you're saying is true, how could it stay that way for longer than a year or so
Engineer salaries have been subsidized by VC and low interest rates. Now that that's drying up layoffs are coming and under-funded companies will start folding. Labor will (hopefully) be efficiently reallocated towards companies that can actually generate profits from that labor. The number of tech companies that can do that are few.
I think this is the end to the 450-500k IC offer
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf From the first bullet point of the summary:
"By contrast, middle (50th percentile) and bottom (10th percentile) wages grew to a lesser degree (e.g., women) or declined in real terms (e.g., men)."
Here's the chart that most people cite when taking about wage stagnation: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-...
That chart (which isn't actually median wage, it's excluding supervisory workers) shows flat wages between 1973 and 2019. But it shows rising wages between 1980 and 2019.
It is important to note when people talk about wage stagnation that median wages have risen pretty steadily since 1997, with an extended period of decline or stagnation before that.
Current median household income is 74,099.
But! 53% of households have dual income in 2022. Up from 51.8% in 1980.
The net is wages are then depressed from 1980 levels.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1982/demo/p60-13...
(EDIT: For whatever it's worth, in general the reason why people who talk about wage stagnation focus on wages instead of household income is that median household income has steadily increased over the last 50 years in a way that median wages haven't. I don't have time to dig into why your two datapoints aren't showing that, but here's a real median household income graph (it only goes back to 1984, didn't find one immediately that goes to 1980). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
In terms of median wages, people gloss the graph I previously linked as "stagnation," but it's not -- it's a drop from 1973 to ~1997, then a rise from 1997 to current (with some fluctuation mostly around the Great Recession of 2008). It's true that 1973 is approximately equal to 2019, but when people hear that wages "stagnated," they generally take away that it was mostly flat in that time, which it wasn't. So they then imagine that from start of any time in that time period to 2019 is mostly flat, which again, it isn't.)
Cost is probably part of why open offices were a thing anyway, reduced costs and more flexibility. So incentives are aligned with WFH, but weren't with open office bullshit. That should be the difference here.
There's 3.6% unemployment, 11.5 million job openings in March, up from 11.3 million in Feb, which is twice the number of job seekers. The US added 431,000 new jobs in April.
There was a blip in GDP but it can be explained by bullwhip effects still rippling through the economy from the pandemic, and china lockdowns.
And mostly the negative effects we're seeing here is hitting all the froth (unicorns, crypto, VC, overpriced tech stocks).
Unless there's contagion from something really large popping soon, this looks more like a correction.
RTO will be so much easier when the job market is flooded with failed start-up engineers and the tech industry cools off.