Can someone explain to me why is top management of these companies so low quality?
They make the big bucks and take years to discover concepts obvious to high-schoolers?
Then there are the 5% of upper managers that know what they're doing. But to the rest it would be an insult if you asked them to 1-to-1 with a random employee and actually understand the real problems in the company.
Anyone feeling this is wrong is free to test it. Ask an upper manager in a large tech company to speak with your coworker who's frustrated at work. Maybe about RTO - there are many of those around now. Good luck!
We have factual evidence about Meta overpaying 50% for talent due to poor work environment and of thousands of engineers complaining about this issue for a decade.
Poor management is conclusion, not a premise.
You need to bring counter-evidence for why this straightforward issue was not addressed 10 years ago.
Maybe cost was never an issue, but collaboration was. Maybe the culture that this policy generated was more important than the extra dollars they had to spend.
Or maybe, just maybe, your "factual evidence" is actually just a casual quip Joel Spolsky threw out there that one time for quick laughs. I would really love to see your sources that state "if Facebook had single offices instead of an open plan office, there would be just as much innovation, collaboration and successful products, yet the total cost of payroll would be 30% less." I'm pretty sure that's impossible to prove, regardless whether you'll label it with "factual evidence" or not.
Story time.
I wanted to check the IT vending machine a few days ago which involved visiting different floor. My jaw dropped (on the floor) at how different life could be.
I heard laughter, cheers, happiness even, and talk lots of talk. At that point I realised I was not on a dev floor but accounting, HR and so on.
Maybe it was the time, maybe it was just a single time event, but it made an impression on me. The open office environment clearly was working for them.
I made haste to the elevator, the doors closed and the world was silent again. I returned to my little corner where I was at peace. Me, my laptop, and some books.
Basically, because of macroeconomic factors. It's been so easy to borrow money for so many years that there's been no pressure for management of tech companies to work very hard or economize much or be very smart.