> The three biggest levers are (1) “N-1 backfills”, (2) requiring a business rationale for promotions into senior-most levels, and (3) shifting hiring into cost efficient hiring regions.

I had the experience to work in a scale up like Carta couple years ago where the company stoped to hire in NYC/Berlin and as far as I know they shifted their hiring to Philippines.

Fair play, the end of the day the company had their incentive structures to support this decision.

However, after that and other events I just started to do career movements towards companies that I know that I would bring unique features in my position (eg language skills, legal settings, specific regulatory knowledge, local compliance) to be more not entrenched but in a non-constant second thoughts professional relationships in a good sense or be in epistemically different worlds where international competition is irrelevant (eg clearance filters based in nationality, government and military, market that has exotic languages, etc).

I say that because I really do not like of this “Employee as a Service” where line an AWS console you just change the region and spin up labor like some EC2 machine; where in this scenario, you are seen as some expensive spot instance in us-east-1.

Maybe I am being highly defensive, but I do not see hereafter anything I that regard getting better since we have remote work and talent everywhere.