> It's a win for the environment

My friend works at a company in the city we live in. People working in that particular office live in nearby towns or even two countries over (EU).

Well, this amazing company requires everyone to be physically present in the office every day. So, the people living two countries over fly in every Sunday night in a second apartment they're renting here and leave on Friday afternoon, flying back home for the weekend. Every. Week.

The math works for said employees because they are earning a very high CoL salary (they're local employees, of where the office is) but they live in very low CoL countries, so in fine they get paid multiples what they would holding a job local to them.

And here I am having qualms about flying once or twice a year on vacation... This kind of things really makes me think we're completely fucked and we'll cook ourselves to our death. Very tempting to be like them and say "fuck it, I'll do whatever is convenient, pollution and the rest of you be damned. Why shouldn't I?"

Personally I think initial seed-stage should be so that team is the same place, but when you want to scale remote team makes sense. I think the missing ingredient now is that there are not lots of examples and procedures on how to go remote, scale and manage remote teams.

I'm not sure about higher wages following my admittedly limited experience.

I applied to some remote-only companies based in France, but I was quickly out of the competition because the companies could hire other people at much lower wages than what I (living in the most expensive city in the country) was looking for.

I think that hiring remotely will lead to lower compensation on average, because all else being equal companies will prefer those with lower salary expectations.

That's explicitly the point -- target qualified or mostly qualified individuals in lower COL areas. You may not be the best qualified remote worker but we can shave your salary by 80K if you live in rural Kentucky and still get a good enough IT worker in ~6 months.

Companies also make office overhead costs into an externalized problem, in that the employee is responsible for desks/tables/chairs/heating/cooling, plus bandwidth and even computers. I see big advantages and downsides to this, but it is useful from a cost cutting perspective.

The tradeoff is the difficulty of hiring, managing, and communicating remotely. Plus I don't think everyone is cut out for remote work -- after 5 years remote I'm starting to think I'm not...

Not sure how increasing the hiring pool also increases wages.

Less overheads. The two are not interlinked as the sentence suggests.