There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut.
Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too?
Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?
I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.
While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.
All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.
The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.
WFH-advocates turning to "arguments" like your post is one reason why I oppose this new trend of entitlement. You people really think you are on top of the world and everyone has to dance to your tunes, right? I hope the market will fix this. Go and find a WFH company that lets you slack-off from home all day long. And then, shut up!
1) pathologically envious enough to punish people because they work from home
2) motivated by ordering colleagues around, which becomes harder if not in person
3) unable to appreciate the comfort of working from home and the importance of having a life.
Do you, as an "admin", feel entitled to be "on top of the world"? Everyone has to dance to your tunes, right?
And there is a difference between "care duties" and the "papa is at home so we can pester him with family stuff all day long". We have 2 weeks of extra leave for parents, they already have extra priviledges compared to non-parents. If someone declares a few days off because they have to fix something important with their family, that is fine and never was an issue.
But WFH people suddenly realizing at 10 AM that they can not be bothered to work for the next 3 hours is definitely unfair and overstretching the priviledges.
Unless you own the company what do you care?
This is obviously hyperbole for... living a life?
Hiring, the same way RO outfits can access unique talent, and information transfer, particularly to newer team members. Also, in industries where over-documentation is an unnecessary liability.
I enjoy going to an office, having a change of scenery, interacting with people (both close friends and casual acquaintances), brainstorming ideas with a small group around a whiteboard, getting lunch with colleagues, etc, etc...
Sure, the "writing code" part of the job is easier when there are fewer distractions. And a crowded open office can be an annoying source of distractions.
And I definitely enjoy having lunch more often with my family, or hanging out with the dogs, or sitting out on my deck under the trees while I read my morning email.
But working in an office was nice too, and I miss it.
You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent.
But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data.
I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful measurement. As with a lot of corporate decisions, I suspect it's a lot of HIPPOs, fingers in the air, and herding behavior.
The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:
1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.
2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.
People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.
That's precisely the problem. The decision makers suffer from extreme confirmation bias and Dunning-Kruger effect. So what happens is they run surveys, polls etc which are loaded and indicate that employees would 'love' to return to the office. They mandate RTO and are then surprised when people leave en masse because the data they've collected is wrong.
That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.
They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.
They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.
They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.
They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).
> according to data they are seeing
Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.
Thing is, that normally works out, but large shifts like the "new normal" during the pandemic can take a while for the gut to pick up, and so the default is to get back to the known-good state...
I agree. They are seeing the data that their skills of busy-bodies bouncing between meetings and impromptu conversations at other employees desks don't translate well to remote work and they understand that their nice 3mil$ house in the valley will cost much less in couple of years if everyone embraces full remote, so they are doing their best to preserve the status quo.
It's hardly all roses.
Reducing people's different experiences to a homogeneous grey mush is overly reductive.
More progressive corps embraced online socializing earlier, and honestly that's all I need. To be sure something is lost socially by not being in person, but the workplace is not social-drinks club, or if it is that's where your productivity went.
You still build connections with people you only meet online, older folk might have more trouble with that, which makes sense why they might struggle to manage if they heavily depend on "making friends" to do their job.
Training and onboarding can be issues, but barring a straight up lack of talent generally focused efforts are probably better than just assuming the new employee will "make connections" and learn via osmosis.
And yes this might mean going to the office once in a while or to a company event etc
Not an unsurmountable problem but it's not negligible neither (as much as it is slowly growing)
I work in an organization with 10s of thousands of workers across the United States. I will never, in the best circumstances, see more than a handful of them in person, other than in-person team meetings, which have themselves become increasingly rare as the team is more geographically diverse than ever and travel budgets are slashed due to ready electronic collaboration tools. So ... what connection? I mean, I don't really care about having a personal connection with these folks anyway. I like them and enjoy having a positive professional relationship with them, but they're my coworkers and we have amazing tools to build those relationships. If some of them become friends, that's fine, but it's not anywhere close to a prerequisite for me to be successful and fulfilled at work.
My entire career I've worked successfully with people I never met who live on the other side of the planet. The whole discussion about the necessity of in-person collaboration over the last 3 years has struck me as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I haven't had a conference call in 3 years. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary and positive that change is. I see my coworkers' faces more now than I ever did in the past thanks to Zoom and Teams. It's nothing short of miraculous how much better things are now.
In return for giving up a pointless commute to use a different Internet connection and for spending less time pandering to bosses who want to promote buddies who look like them instead of competent leaders, I can spend more time with people and things I actually care about and more time doing work I love. Every single bit of this new arrangement is roses.
Tech companies are not representative.
Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents?
[1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...
You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight.
This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.
Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here.
As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).
- proximity to family and community support
- quality of schools for kids
- some people want to live out in the boonies, with a hobby farm or a real homestead
- shared cultural or political values
- some folks want to be nomadic, couch surfing or living out of a souped up van or rv
- some folks want to be able to stay with extended family for longer
- some folks want to cowork locally
- I know one guy who lives in a low cost of living area and reinvest the arbitrage back into his local community while still living comfortably
In my family’s case, I have been regularly going to the local indoor play gym so that my toddler can wear himself out. It’s too hot to play outside.
Also, flexibility != remote
There are remote work places which installs invasive software to monitor “butt-in-seat”, and you don’t really get flex time.
I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares.
With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...but this trend is relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales.
Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal".
There's no "not ready", it entirely a choice by management.
Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software. It's even worse there. Their remote culture is highly dysfunctional and she goes into the office 5 days a week even though she doesn't need to.
An example: in some companies, the receptionist knows who has entered and exited the building, and can sometimes become the defacto person that can help people find each other. Someone whose effectiveness depends upon this informal role of the receptionist will find that they can’t work like this anymore when the company goes remote.
What are you talking about then?
> Anyway, it's not as easy as you say and I have the result right in front of me. The company has not mandated return to office but is still struggling a lot with this so what exactly is the choice by management here?
I don't know what you're talking about. What result? What company? Can you give some more detail or did I miss a post?
I have many concrete examples right in front of me, which is the number of companies and government agencies that went to remote extremely rapidly during covid shutdowns.
> Another example is my SO who works for a now-flex remote government agency where they are not authorized to use any of the normal software.
Like I said, that's just a simple choice. Most probably by some self-important bureaucrat who wants to sabotage the remote work scheme. All they would have to do is use normal software like many other places permit, and that would be most of the battle.
Most companies attempt to have office culture and working style while working remotely, which absolutely sucks.
There are not a lot of companies (And employees) who have figured out how to do remote well.
The vast, vast majority of person-hours required to go from drawing board to bits of silicon running in customer's computer can be done entirely without physical presence though.
I know mechanical and structural engineers and it's much the same for them.
* On-boarding - new employees are no longer able to suss out the company by chatting to people they bump into. They need well-defined ways to meet other teams and to learn how to communicate and collaborate within the company.
* Socialising - there needs to be a regular opportunity (not mandatory) to meet up in person, even if there's no office.
* Communication - this is a biggie. The company can't just install Teams/Slack/Skype everywhere and expect collaboration to continue as before. Instant messaging apps are terrible for building asynchronous communication habits, since they incentivise quickfire messages. The company needs to publish guidelines on how to give status updates and ask for support, and potentially make communication skills be part of employee evaluation (if not already).
* Evaluation - remote work gives senior management a bad feeling because they don't feel like they know what's going on in the company. The root cause of this is that they're not actually evaluating employee output, but rather something else (e.g. how the employee contributes to meetings or responds to in-person questions). This kind of works in the office since those things correlate somewhat with employee quality. But remote work forces managers to think about how to objectively measure employee output and productivity... and some of them either resent the extra effort or just aren't imaginative enough.
None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
The skills you might have picked up to be someone effective while in person doesn’t mean you will be effective working through Slack. Zoom is not a perfect substitute — much of the non-verbal communication that happens in person is no longer there; plus, if you’re not using the Zoom chat as the backchannel, you miss out on effective use of Zoom.
In a verbal conversation, you can whittle down to this by asking questions and rephrasing the other person. In remote situations you need to spend time thinking about what information to include and how to phrase it, before even touching the keyboard.
I still get messages along the lines of "Hi, I'm trying to do X but it's not working! Can you look into it?". With a bit of forethought this can become "Hi. I'm trying to do X because client C wants to be able to do Y. I've tried action A but I'm getting issue I. I looked into the logs and found L, so then I also tried action A2 but ran into issue I2. Here is a screenshot of what I mean. I am on environment E and using configuration C. Do you have any suggestions for how I could proceed?"
It really isn't. Not for a lot of companies. Smaller, older, single-site operations maybe. Almost anything with more than one location is already intimately familiar with distributed communication, typically don't replicate HR everywhere so have all electronic onboarding anyway (aside from sending a laptop or whatever).
> None of this is to say that remote work isnt worth it. It absolutely is. But let's not pretend that it's a small jump from what most companies currently do.
Not sure what you mean by "worth it". It has some pros and cons, I work remote and that's great for me, I don't pretend to know all the details about financials and productivity impact across a significant organization. But for many it actually isn't as big a jump as they try to claim, let's not pretend that it is. Covid was a concrete demonstration of exactly that where I am, even very conservative companies and government orgs went to large fraction of employees remote in very short order.
This accounts for around half of US employees and most US businesses. In the UK and other countries, it's even more.
> all electronic onboarding anyway
That's not true, you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office. And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
Right. Far from the "few and far between" narrative here, isn't it?
> That's not true,
I'm talking about HR onboarding. Signatures, payroll, boilerplate regulatory compliance training etc.
> you'll almost always be having in-person chats throughout your on-boarding if you're in the office.
Nope, not if HR is located elsewhere. It's phone, email, electronic meetings.
> And anyway, the tech really isn't the issue here. As a new recruit in the office, you're usually sitting near your mentor/line manager. Every now and then they'll verbally check in with you, or you can tell them you're stuck on something and they'll tell you what to do or who to go to. As other colleagues approach your team area, your manager introduces you to them and explains what they do.
"If you're in the office you'll be in the office".
All of this stuff is trivial to do online. I don't pretend it has exactly the same results, and one possibly valid concern is monitoring and hepling newer and less proven employees. It doesn't mean that just because there are certain pros and cons that the whole idea falls in a heap at the first hurdle though, so those kinds of anecdotes do not address what I wrote.
> In a remote environment, all of this suddenly takes a lot more conscious pro-active effort. Check-ins have to be rigorously scheduled. New hires need to feel safe enough to approach anyone they need to, and to be told in writing who to approach and how. They need to be introduced to everyone explicitly via call or messaging. They need to be protected from falling "out of sight, out of mind", and encouraged to build personal connections with colleagues.
None of this is rocket science, and all of the tools to do it trivially exist in any software suite any company uses even ones that aren't remote. Email, calendar, chat. Or a physical pen and notepad if you must. Checking in on people isn't some incredible and complicated new skill managers have to learn, that's what they do.
Studies in the UK demonstrate that feeling isolated and making connections with colleagues in a remote environment is a major concern for younger employees: https://universumglobal.com/blog/the-leadership-gap-young-wo...
This is an organisational issue which isn't solved just by making tools like email and calendar available.
The point I'm making is that it's not because an organization is "not ready" that remote work is not permitted. Implying there is some set of steps or purchases they need to make and then they are ready. It's because the people who can make the decision don't want to.
I thought that I repeatedly made it clear that I made no value judgement on the remote work and didn't claim that is a bad decision to make.
I absolutely disagree with this. At least I disagree that most companies can do so and be confident of maintaining productivity. I believe it requires a big shift in organisational and operational processes and attitudes within the company.
I have been working remote for years before the pandemic made it mainstream. In one of the companies I worked for, I was not the first remote worker. The first person in the company pioneered the tech, practices, and culture to make it work as a hybrid. After I came in, bit by bit, the engineering team went remote. So when the pandemic hit, the company had already had a mode of work that more or less helped out the rest of the company.
These things were not free. The pioneer had to really put himself out there to implement the remote best practices. By the time I got there, most of that was in place.
Just off the top of my head, unorganized:
- manage outcomes instead of time spent
- Explicit presence: as a remote worker, you have to be explicit and deliberate about making your presence known. Status emojis, socialization, and “thinking out loud” threads
- Use [async] tags in messages whenever you can to help manage urgency of reply. Same with statuses
- Daily standups become even more important in order to promote social bonding, including brief chit-chat right before everyone shows up. Video if you can. It is about the only time the team bonds together
- Use the zoom chat for backchannel, so that you can still get something out without interrupting the speaker
- Having said that: Slack history records everything. Do not use Zoom chat as meeting notes. Put that into Slack, and then into Confluence/Notion/OneNote.
- Shared documents to work out a plan over Zoom helps keeps things focused
- You will be exercise writing a lot more. Leverage that. Be more thoughtful about replies. You can always link to conversations in tickets and documents
- Make use of do not disturb and periods when not to recieve notifications
- Keep your calendar up to date. Make sure to block out maker time (focus time), lunch, async times, and when you are running errands. That way, people can quickly schedule a time with you if needed
- Slack huddles in open channels can simulate drop-in calls. If you like pairing, you can start a huddle with yourself and work there. Rename the huddle to make it clear that you are open to drop ins, add a summary in the huddle thread to make the work visible
- hybrid meetings suck. People in person have to make more of an effort to make people who are remote in known. Conference rooms should be setup to put zoom folks on the wall, and zoom folks should put their video up. (It works better as all in person or all zoom meeting)
- team, dept, and maybe company should periodically bring everyone together onsite to do the things you cannot do remote
I disagree. As long as i still see traffic in cities, it means remote work is still a tiny minority
Or do you want police or ambulances or surgeons to also work remotely?
Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications.
When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0]
>The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks
I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logisti...
Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.
I can say with the utmost confidence that spending more time and money downtown is the last thing that my 3 hour round trip commute motivates me to do
It sounds like you'd be very unlikely to enter downtown for any other reason. Also, may I suggest you move your home or employment? 3 hours is a lot of commuting and that is bad for you.
Unfortunately, they will have a lot to lose by not being cheap anymore. At least for the locals. See Lisbon or Boise, for example.
This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.
It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota.
I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers.
The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.
Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison.
Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway.
I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.
The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results.
I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.
People in different countries/continents work differently, have different expectations around how much initiative non-managers should take, etc.
I’m not saying one is worse than the other. What I’m saying is that trying to mix these levels and hoping to exploit cheap labor to offshore doesn’t work well in my experience and what’s saved on paper is paid tenfold in customer attrition, employee turnover, high severity outages, that kind of thing.
For example, having had experience with Indian sweatshops, the people working there were paid a pitance compared to us, had to use their own equipment, no paid sick days, forced to commute several hours to work and back… imagine how interested they were in the work, being treated like subhumans by their employer. And whenever we’d talk about technical problems, they’d always say yes even if it turned out they had no clue what needed to be done or how to do it. I believe it was a factor of the tyrannical management there, but also a cultural thing. Same with asking for feedback, we had a culture (country, not corporate) where it’s common to ask for and receive honest feedback. The offshored staff could never wrap their heads around it. Or being asked to do something unclear/stupid: onshore would bring it up/challenge it/ask for clarifications, offshore would just go ahead and do… something, anything. Then we’d have to spend time redoing it and rethinking it losing weeks of work. But it was cheap, look how much were saving!!
I hope this doesn’t come as racist. I do t mean that the Indian offshores were worse people than onshore employees! What I mean is that there was a huge values gap between the two, very different ways of working, different expectations, different power dynamics and that they absolutely didn’t mesh together well at all.
We were appalled at the conditions offshore had to work under. One of the workers had cancer and couldn’t really afford the treatment because apparently health insurance isn’t really a thing in India and had to come work sick because they couldn’t afford the treatment otherwise… it was a disgrace and we tried to pressure management to face the human cost of their penny pinching.
It’s not impossible to have offshore and onshore working together and save money but I’ve never seen it done well so I’m very doubtful it can work.
And I think that’s our moat: we work differently, have different values, and different levels of initiative that local comapnies benefit from more than the marginal amount saved on exploiting offshore labor (in the context of sweatshops)
That said, with all the communications in place today I think the culture is becoming global with newer generations having less and less difference between countries.
Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones.
As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to affect why that doesn't work.
Them: Hello, <name>
8-16 hours pass
Me: Hello, did you need something?
8-16 hours pass
Them: How are you?
8- 16 hours pass
As a matter of fact, even when you chit chat do it in self contained units. You don't know how much time passes till your co workers read your joke in #general.
The pandemic made it clear that there are naturally forming windows of better collaboration around longitudinal time zones. Outside of +/- 2 time zones becomes fairly difficult on a regular basis. West coast to East coast is difficult.
For Americans, there may be some interesting competition coming out Mexico and perhaps a few of the more advanced countries of South America like Brazil and Argentina.
For Europeans I would expect the same from Africa, from countries like South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, etc.
But once you are outside of +/- 2 time zones you either need one side to shift schedules or have zone local orgs.
At that point it’s less about remote work and more about outsourcing. We already know what outsourcing looks like, and it’s very different from remote work.
Bottom line, I do expect to see increased competition for remote jobs, but for the good roles that matter the competition is not truly global.
Basically what's likely to happen in the long term is that shipping high skill jobs oversees will increase the world market size to a point where it's not going to actually leed to poverty in the rich regions.
Even the much hated exit of manufacturing jobs to Asia did not leed to an quantifiable decline in living standards in America as a whole and exiting the EU is not leading to an rise in working class wages across Britain.
With sensible management increasing industrial activity in the poorer regions can actually happen without a whole lot of negative side effect for the wealthy regions, but that require an kind of rational, fact based policy making that the current western political culture cannot produce as emotional irationalism seems to be an far better way to get elected then calm rationalism.
The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now.
They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.
Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones.
COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option.
People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was.
Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events.
Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties.
I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.
Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it.
But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc
And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).