How do you tell managers that having good developers is a privilege?

Perhaps. But managers have budgets, and at most companies controlling those budgets is the path to success. If I can deliver a great product with smaller staff (and less overhead) I'm generally going to come out far ahead.

I remember one of my first forays into management. It was a small team full of really good developers. We delivered ahead of schedule and way under budget. I remember thinking "this sucks, I'm not really DOING anything. I'm just letting these guys go out and kill it and keeping everything out of the way. This isn't going to end well for me".

It was the opposite. My boss was pleased as punch that we came in way under budget and ahead of schedule. The complexity (or lack of) didn't really seem to even show up on his radar.

> and keeping everything out of the way.

Because this is supposed to be the job of a good manager. Not bossing people around, but abstracting away and isolating things irrelevant to their tasks.

Congratulations on your success!

A diplomatic situation implies a meeting of equals. That comment suggests a meeting wherein you very very very gently raise the possibility that perhaps there can be a small change to what's been mandated.

Cordial and professional doesn't mean being a doormat, and talking to management as an adult with autonomy over one's own life does not require an ultimatum.

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.

There is nothing about the poster that implies that the poster is particularly young. Simply that the developer isn't part of management. Additionally, it is a fallacy to confuse entitlement with rationalism. The developer rationally knows that based on their skills they can go elsewhere easily. The question posed is an interesting one. The manager who has been brought on certainly has the right to make changes. But don't fall prey to the assumption that the manager is a good one. Companies fail all the time because they make human mistakes. The tragedy here is that chances are this cultural shift will probably kill this company if it is too small. Most developers these days have the privilege of picking workplaces based on the culture and companies that don't account for this won't succeed. There is a reason that google has a fleet of private busses that take their developers to and from work.