Not only will those employers competing for the best get the best, they'll get it at a discount rate because remote workers are on average willing to accept an 18% pay cut to remain fully remote.
Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.
There's often an alignment problem where upper management often has some stake/ownership in the business being successful, where the lower/middle managers might see their work as just a salaried job, and hence not as driven to work for the success of the company, and might optimize for things like their own ego when it costs the company money.
There's only so much upper management can do to set incentives (Goodhart's law) without micromanaging the middle managers.
The center isn't just insecure managers. Plenty of people want to work together... together. I happen to run my team remote, but to reduce a real issue to insecurity is to starve the conversation of meaningful contributions.
Their job is to support their staff against higher management. They are failing to do that if their teams are begrudgingly going back to work. They really do have all the leverage here. A business cannot function without labor or else it would just be the c suite as the only people employed.
Once you factor in taxes and commute expenses, 18% is practically break-even for even a well compensated employee, and that doesn't include the QOL factor.
Indeed, middle management is the plight of modern civilization. They'll probably get replaced by AI soon enough.
Middle management's job seems like the easiest to replace by AI. They don't create any products directly, they only take orders from above and distribute them to below. They take feedback from below, possibly communicate it up, most likely communicate it laterally to another team, etc.
So, I think we'll see 5 middle managers replaced by 1 or 2 middle managers + AI. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
It's like anything else - the closer you get to the problem, the more work you see that happens.
Directors are often the group that is doing all the work nobody else is assigned. This goes from scheduling off-sites to preparing for audits to determining who handles unscheduled work that doesn't neatly fit into any one team. Directors are responsible for coaching engineering managers and are the backstop for problems outside the skill level of the eng manager.
They also handle project management because in smaller organizations, those positions have already been condensed.
Now, I think there's an alternative. You could hire an executive assistant that offloads some of what directors do. You could have a project manager or two handle all the projects across the portfolio for medium sized orgs - you're likely looking at 1.5 project managers for a director salary. (I think there is a place for AI there, but I actually think we have a better algorithm with Monte Carlo simulation.) You could have non-directors doing 85% of what a director does today, but you're still hiring high-skill people.
But if AI could replace a director then so could an EM. An EM can write a weekly status better than an AI and if a VP-Eng could rely on that, directors would have been replaced long ago.
Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but when pulling in the dregs they're paying a premium for it. The center cannot hold.