I live in Brazil. We have some striving software houses, but they are few and pay a lot less than, say, my employer, Bigtime Consulting.

To vote with my feet I'd have to accept an income downgrade of about 30%, higher risk of unemployment, and even then (heck, I'm looking for something like this right now) it's hard to find.

Because not everyone wants 20% below market rate, consntant negotiation headaches on stock dilution, an "infinite" vacation policy that actually means none, or being part of a culture that expects 70+ hour work weeks as normal, 3 months of maternity leave being ruinous to the company, etc.

It's a tradeoff, for sure.

But also most companies are waking up to the notion that trusted network models are not effective. It just takes time to change.

Ugh. 'Infinite' vacation policies are starting to infect corporaculture. I work for a megacorp (that I actually rather enjoy working for) that recently went this way, and since my megacorp is a bit of a trend setter, you can expect it to spread. During the explanation meeting, it was made clear that we really aren't supposed to take more vacation than what we used to have, but that we are expected to still actually take about as much vacation as we used to have ... so essentially a no-change there. As far as I can tell, it's mostly about

1) Making it so that employees can't take vacation at times that are particularly bad for a project because they're 'entitled' to it. This was already frowned upon (we always did get to use our vacation eventually, so it wasn't so bad), but now it's in writing -- which is good, rules should be written.

and, more importantly to the megacorp: 2) Eliminating owed vacation from their books & marginally reducing cost. Now if somebody quits or is canned, they're not owed a payout. I'm guessing the average employee will probably also take a couple of days less than they did under the old system, yielding a further savings.

I'm glad I live in a country where it's illegal not to pay out unused leave entitlements upon termination, and where there is a sensible statutory minimum leave entitlement...

I'm in a corporate environment too. The work is interesting and I'm slowly working with IT Security to break down the walls where needed, but I still find myself submitting bug reports like:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/msysgit/B31LNftR4BI

https://github.com/abbr/NodeSSPI/issues/10

https://github.com/abbr/NodeSSPI/issues/9

(Note that I've since found out it's better to support SSPI and NEGOTIATE)

That's before we even get started with SSL interception -npm/node and possibly Ruby's gem don't use the system cert list.

The answer is not to vote with my feet (because there are lots of reasons to stay) but work to make things better for developers in more restricted environments. Geez, wait til you startup kids go work for the Government one day ;)

Just because SV is an employee's market that doesn't mean that everywhere is, or that everybody has a lot of mobility in their personal life.

Because my country has a 20% unemployment rate and a 50% unemployment rate for youth such as me?

If the developer needs access, the product will suffer for a lack of it, and customers will eventually leave. If not, then it's just a petty complaint.