It's not that they don't hire remote employees. Most of them do.

It's that a high-level remote employee at a physical-first company is at a major political disadvantage compared to their onsite peers.

Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I've never seen an opening for a remote SWE job for any of FAANG.

If they did, they could pay 75% of what I'm told they do and still be far and away the most appealing employer for talented engineers in most places.

I recently received an offer from Apple for a remote software engineering role. Amazon will also hire remote employees for certain teams in AWS. And I’m aware of both Facebook and Google hiring remote employees (or allowing employees to become fully remote) if they’re excellent and the alternative is losing them.

It’s not an explicit policy and they don’t actively encourage it. But they’ll make it work for the right person - I agree though, don’t go into it thinking you’ll be remote. If you want to work remotely for very high compensation (close to FAANG but not exactly competitive), comsider working at a second tier public tech company like Salesforce or a strong unicorn like Stripe (both of which explicitly support it).

Something big. Running a huge organization effectively is already really hard -- just look at how many companies do a terrible job of it -- and having a large percentage of WFH employees would just increase the difficulty even further.

I've encountered some well-run and successful companies that hire remote employees and the two things that seem to be common to them is that they're remote-first and remote-first from day one. Transitioning into either of those seems a bridge too far for most companies.

Older people with outdated visions of “butts in seats” need to stop running things.

That’s an unfair characterization. A lot of people, myself included, do not enjoy remote work. I did it for years and I’m over it. You might consider that there are valid argumemts both for and against working remotely.

I wouldn’t consider myself an “older person” with “outdated visions.” But I still wouldn’t want to work with or be managed by someone working remotely.