I agree, but with a caveat. The _very_ top execs of large organizations (Google, Facebook, etc.) may be anxious to get to a lower-salary environment, and remote work may be a necessary part of that. If they are determined to move to a structure where they don't have to pay SV salaries, they might overrule their middle-management and extend remote work in order to facilitate that.

This is a very underrated comment. Many people romanticize the work from home no commute in a rural area, but do not be surprised to find corporations taking advantage of your new found anchor.

Also consider the expanding talent pool and competition. I live in Michigan. I would love to work with Microsoft or Google, because they do some very interesting work. However relocating across the country, away from established friends and family, isn't something I can currently consider.

Average developer salaries for my area are between 60-100k, so if Microsoft can offer 120k+, a lot of (great) devs in my area would probably take that. Local devs get better wages, and companies save some money.

However, they could also outsource to India for even cheaper results, but who knows how well that will go.

Having been present for outsourcing attempts that went badly, I can say that generally they will not (did not) go well. I don't know if it was that the devs were not good, the communication loop was bad, they were supporting too many outsourcing customers at once, or what. But, on multiple occasions I've seen it not turn out well. That ship sailed long before the pandemic.

So, the question is, will it work any better in Michigan? Quite possibly; the timezone and language differences are much less. Plus, if you worked for Microsoft or Google, you probably wouldn't try to also work for 2-3 other employers at the same time. But, if the issue was simply that remote work impedes good communication, the results will be similar.

My guess, it will sometimes work. I guess we'll find out soon.

Key thing here is just to not accept salary scaling- there is no reason for remote workers to subsidize SF rents by accepting lower wages.

> And the managers, who subsist on meetings and in-person interaction, seem even more anxious to get everyone back in their desks.

I recently quit my job so I could stop being a manager and return to IC, exactly because of this. In a WFH climate managers have to work twice as hard to stay competitive in the political games.

Sounds like they're half as useful to the business rather than their jobs are twice as hard

Effort and business utility are not necessarily linear. For argument's sake let's assume they are. A manager affects the productivity of all of his/her reports. Let's say a manager has 10 reports. If the manager stops working twice as hard, maybe all of the manager's reports would become 1/2 as productive. That means the manager's 2x work provides the same business utility as 5 ICs.

This assumes that manager productivity is positively correlated with their reports' productivity.

It's hard for me to think about how else to measure manager productivity. Managers don't usually submit code themselves.

Lots of people in a business aren't submitting code, but that's not really my point. Depending on a manager's style they can increase synchronization overhead between team members and different teams to the point that everyone's productivity is reduced while the manager has never been busier or productive on paper.

A manager's productivity IS the team's productivity, and should be measured in results.

A "productive" manager that slows down the team isn't an effective manager at all, no matter how hard he or she is working.

The manager might be able to scapegoat a poor team member or two when poor results become evident, but sooner or later, he or she will have to pay the piper.

I used to think that before I became a manager.

> All this is to say, I'm skeptical that workers won't be called back into the office as soon as leadership gets the chance.

That forget the leadership on top of that leadership though!

Where I work, before covid they were working on expanding quite a bit the amount of office space but as far as I understands, all theses plans got cancelled and instead we won't have permanent desk and instead we will works remotely 2-3 days a week. That's coming from a company that had literally no remote works before Covid (except while travelling).

It represents so much money to have less office space, as long as the manager doesn't play too much with their staff efficiency during Covid, it will just make sense to save money there.

Working from home 2-3 days a week is not what I would consider "remote work," since you'd still need to live close to the office.

From my perspective, this is worst of all possible scenarios. Employees are still shackled to an expensive city, but now they must pay for housing that supports a dedicated "home office" space (e.g., a larger apartment with an extra room, or carving out part of their living room/bedroom). This is just shifting the cost burden of real estate from the company onto the employees.

I disagree. If I only had to come into the office, say, once or twice a week (3x might be pushing it) I'd be willing to live much further out because I'd be willing to tolerate a horrible commute if I only had to do it a small percentage of the time.

For example, in Austin, these days anything located within a half hour of downtown tends to be horribly expensive. But just go a little beyond that and house/real estate prices drop precipitously. You're going to see a boom in these exurbs as these "mostly remote" jobs increase.

Not to mention that the area available within N miles grows quadratically with N, so it'll run out more slowly/be more spacious.

I feel working from home is convenient but will never be fun like working in an office can be.

I agree. The people with the power have far more incentive to return to the old model than to try a different one.