Went to stackexchange, wanted to make comment, "must have 50 reputation points to comment", remembered why I don't use sites like stackexchange.com.

I'm a big fan of Dale Carnegie's book, and like many famous books, you can support many arguments using it. Also, it's strange that the top voted posts pulls several quotes for changing someone's opinion/winning an argument and uses that to support an argument of: "Respect his authority", which is nowhere in the Carnegie book.

I think of the story Dale Carnegie relates when a hotel he had long worked with decided to massively increase the rates for renting out that venue after the engagement had already been booked. (Analogous to changing workplace rules after you've already decided to work their in return for certain forms of monetary and non-monetary compensation).

The hotel certainly had every right to change their rental prices, it is, after all, their property. Dale had every right to either accept the new prices, complain about the new prices or leave. (I hope I don't have to spell out the analogies anymore).

So what did Dale do? He called up the hotel, not in an angry way, and laid out a list of pros and cons to the hotel changing their prices for speaking engagements.

Under pros, they would have an open schedule during a busy time of the year, and could book other engagements. Under cons, instead of getting value from Dale Carnegie, they would get none. The other Con was that having Dale Carnegie speak at the venue gave them tons of exposure to their target demographic.

The employee/employer relationship, especially for developers, isn't too dissimilar, and I think the SO OP gets that. While it's certainly the companies decision about whether or not they want to change workplace policies (including non-monetary forms of compensation like flexible hours), employees are under zero obligation to continue providing their services under the new plan.

However, A nice employee who has been treated respectfully may decide to warn the company, out of the good of his or her heart, that their new "compensation" program will cause them to lose one or more employees, which will result in a decrease in morale, productivity, the manager in question might end up being punished for his or her poor retention performance, and they will have become less competitive in the insanely competitive market for development talent.

You can call them ultimatums if you want, but at the end of the day employees agree to a compensation package in return for their services. Both sides can terminate that agreement at any time, and changes to either the service the employee provides or the compensation the employer provides are valid reasons to do so.

The word "authority" doesn't come into play.

In the software development industry, it's not like working for the town plant. It's extremely progressive, has great compensation benefits and flexibility. If a company isn't keeping up with the standard compensation package, you're doing them a service (though they may not realize it) by letting them know and possibly quitting. I've always understood 6-7 hours in the office to be quid pro quo for things like crunch time, servers going down in the middle of the night, etc.

Nothing's stopping the company from posting a job that pays 40k and requires 80 hours a week of in-office time, and nothing will force a competent developer to apply for that job.