But even if companies decided to see how much abuse employees would take, that doesn't explain this. The point of the master's program wasn't to reward the employee; it was to make the employee more valuable for the company.

I think the issue is that companies no longer trust their ability to retain their more valuable employees. Why pay to make the employee more valuable for someone else?

It may be an overall increase in economic anxiety, even at the corporate level. At one time, AT&T could probably not imagine their status would ever really change; today, you'd be foolish to be running almost any company in the US economy and think that the company's position in 10 years is likely to be similar to the one it has today. Making longer term investments in employee skills is almost certainly concomittant with the idea of tackling their income needs/desires/wants, and that looks intimidating when you don't have faith that your company will still be growing 5 years from now.

Upper level is generally trying to figure out how to pad their golden parachute for the next quarter.

This is somewhat self-fulfilling is it not? I fear my valuable employee may leave, so to protect myself in this situation I withhold resources I could have granted them. Said employees later realize they could get better and leave.

It is in many cases. Short tenures often become normalized all the way around so companies tend to expect employees not to stick around too long and employees have a mindset that frequent job hunting is just what you do.

> What changed? A lot. The underlying theme across all companies, to both employees and customers, has been "see how much abuse they'll take before they leave", which sadly has had marvelous results because the answer is... a lot. Notice that at least half of the largest companies by market cap have no actual support at all.

That's probably a direct consequence of the (Milton) Friedman doctrine taking hold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine), which has made capitalism much less friendly to customers and employees in order maximize shareholder rewards.

For customers and employees, this kind of capitalism "optimizes" your situation until it's as bad as you can take without quitting. If you're genuinely happy, that's a glitch that's in the process of being worked out.