Raw LLM Responses

I’m a former manager, now CIO at a small IT company. I know this might not be popular, but I want to share where I see the industry heading from the inside. Just hear me out. A story in three parts. 1.) RTO and the Talent Crisis Two years ago, we had a hybrid setup slightly over half remote, a little less in-office. Split unevenly across teams doing web/enterprise and embedded consulting. As embedded work dried up we shuttered that division, and we restructured, consolidated offices, and decided it was time to RTO. The backlash was intense. People wanted more money, hated the new open office, and overall morale took a hit. The executives were stunned. We had to shut down parts of our slack because people were openly attacking the decision. I hate to harp on it because it's beat to death but remote was really the first spark that set the fire. It became clear that many employees had little loyalty and would jump ship over taking their cubes and changing their salaries. That was a wake up call. Businesses can’t depend on individual talent when loyalty is so fragile. 2. Globalization & Shifting Talent Strategies We’ve started leaning more into visa roles, outsourcing, and AI-assisted development. Honestly, the output isn’t always as strong, but it’s more consistent and visa and foreign employees give a lot less pushback. We don't get as many visa roles as we'd like as we're relatively small. I don't fully understand the process, but our executives would prefer to leverage it more than we are. On average I'd say our outsourced devs are worse than most of our old US devs. But our visa and outsourced devs essentially serve as pilots for AI like GitHub Copilot, and our U.S. staff focuses more on documentation and oversight than deep engineering. The trade-off? Lower cost, higher scale. Not perfect but it's working. It's worse, but when we report our labor costs they're substantially lower than they were just 2 years ago. The era of getting "rockstar" or "10x" dev