Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.
Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?
I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.
- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory (obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.
- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and widespread outside of tech.
- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE work).
Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing practices.
Haha, that's fair. To be clear, I believe remote work is generally more productive and represents the future of most knowledge work. I was trying to put words into the mouth of an imaginary conservative executive who is afraid to go the remote path there.
Edit: And is still profitable now. It sounds like I was saying it was only profitable before being acquired :-)
I think one of the important questions though is how does the hiring/firing and maintenance of relationships between employees (including management) be handled when face-to-face is over video conferencing only, usually? How do you measure who's doing well - and encourage them to continue? And nudge ones not doing well - and let them go if they're really not fitting?
And of course maintaining work/life balances is hard....
Communication protocols are one of those good things to be sorting out too, from management perspective. I've had this job for a few years now, and am pretty happy.