Except it doesn’t because so many companies are slowly bringing people back to office and finding a fully remote job is becoming more of a privilege. One anecdote does not validate your views.

But that’s exactly how it works. If you are willing to make the trade off for what you value more then go for it. Many do not want to make the pay or job tradeoff and come into office, and many others (myself included for many cases) think coming in to office is generally good.

Remote is not more attractive to everyone and everyone doesn’t have the same economics on the trade offs.

That’s exactly why it doesn’t work. Leaving our rights to the market to decide does not work. It never has.

Why? Because for the vast majority of people, employers have almost all of the negotiating power. What this means is the market is slowly shaped by what employers want, not employees. Because we need a job more than they need our labor.

It’s naive to think the market is a level playing field and if employees want something they just vote with their labor and the market will adapt. That’s just not true. Most people don’t have the ability to change jobs on a whim to play the market with their livelihoods.

I don’t understand - do you think it’s the government’s role to step in and mandate remote work?

It works fine for tech and most white collar jobs. You can indeed vote with your feet unless you make very poor financial decisions (or have too high of needs) for most of these careers.

There were companies both hybrid and remote before covid (I worked for a few). Covid was a shock that shifted remote work (as well as a lot of other things).

I would not call remote work a privilege. Rather I would say remote work is a benefit. It falls into the same bucket as all the other benefits that employees can weigh in addition to salaries when they weigh job options.

I expect a reversion in terms of remote/hybrid, but not all the way back to where it was before hand. Looked for some stats, didn't find much. From the US BLS[0]:

> However, remote work participation was still higher than its 2019 level in all industries except agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, which returned to its 2019 level.

The data only goes to 2022, but the publication is from 2024. If there are fresher stats, would love to see them, as I think things have changed in 2023 and 2024.

0: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productiv...

I don’t think this is true. This is a lagging indicator and takes time to show the meaningful data. You’ll not get your productivity gains as your top talent leaves and everyone else who is salty will coast doing the bare minimum while looking for a new job. https://youtu.be/4ec_yZCWOCY?si=RQs2bo3w_ATv9X6e

I think companies that won’t adapt and embrace remote/hybrid will slowly decay.

I think hybrid is MUCH closer to in-person than remote. It requires you to be close to a base office.

I think hybrid-with-scheduled-days is almost always a clear win over 5-days in-office, but that full-remote is a huge productivity drain. The cost of alignment, decision making, and collaboration for any sort of creative work goes way up. So unless you know exactly what sorta widgets you need to make and it won't change much more than once a year or so, you're going to have trouble keeping up.

I went through 3 different remote-only startup jobs before finally finding another in-person one, and didn't stay long at any of them because the productivity was just too low. Too much time spent doing things that would be easier in-person or waiting-or-making-up-for async-induced issues.

Those companies will also feel the wrath of the free market. I'd never work for them and I'm quite a high end resource!

You are kidding yourself if you think we have a free market in SWE employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I'll grant you it isn't a perfect market. From the employer side, there's what you shared, as well as the fact that SWEs, like most employees, are not fungible commodities.

From the employee side, there are definitely non-monetary factors that play into the sale of labor as well. And H1Bs (in the USA) or other legal restrictions also impact how labor is sold.

However, would you dispute that there is some level of free market for software engineers? I think there's some level because:

* people can switch jobs (except as legally restricted above)

* companies compete for talent (as indicated by the rise in salaries from 2020-2021 and the AI hiring frenzy now)

* you can have an oversupply of labor (as we're seeing in other areas of software in 2024)

Those all seem like aspects of a market, if not a perfect one.