Disclosure: In October 2021 after 10 years working at Apple I left to join Microsoft, so I’m not totally unbiased.<p>I love the sentiment this article is expressing, and anecdotally the thesis holds in my experience: senior engineers have lots of opportunity, so they can (and will) leave if they disagree with office policies.<p>That said, the article is not good journalism. Its own cited data doesn’t actually represent the conclusion it draws.<p>SpaceX took an extremely draconian return-to-office policy and they suffered for it, but they also suffered for Musk being insane, so I’m not sure the causation is 100% there.<p>Apple actually took the next most draconian policy (required 3 days in the office per week from every employee), and in fact Apple’s enforcement of the policy has been extremely draconian. An acquaintance of mine got in trouble for hopping on a plane to visit their dying parent and not filling out the HR form to use their allowed “two weeks per year” of remote working. One of my former departments at Apple has management checking badge in and out times to enforce the policy. That’s insane!<p>Microsoft’s policy has been the most liberal of the three (which isn’t shown in the data). I left Apple in 2021 in the face of being forced back to the office for a fully-remote role at Microsoft on a team that transitioned from fully in the office in 2018 to fully dispersed in 2021. Articles like this (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/microsoft-rto.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/microsoft-rto....</a>) don’t properly capture Microsoft’s official return to work policy. Microsoft effectively left decisions about returning to the office up to managers and teams, and the corporate leadership incentivized managers to be more liberal by allowing teams to grow more if they hired more remote workers. At one point my team was told that 50% of all new hires were required to be fully remote.<p>The drama day of Microsoft’s policy taking effect which was cited in some articles was really a nothingburger. All you had to do was check the HR website to make sure it properly reflected if you were remote, in-office, or hybrid.