Ask HN: Long Term Impact of Widespread WFH Culture? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Long Term Impact of Widespread WFH Culture?

3 pointstreyfitty3 comments

Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating a WFH culture during the inevitable recession? The last recession in 2007 saw very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in India and other countries where labor is cheap. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now.

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I think the question you raise has the potential to be interesting really interesting, but not really the direction you took it.

My $.02: If the only thing that made you a better candidate than your competition in East Asia is that your company mandated working within an office, then you probably don't have a valuable skillset in the first place, right? There's some really smart people in those parts of the world, but the average candidate they're gonna get is just not gonna be even in the same ballpark. Now that being said, we all know that management is not perfectly rational (or for many of us, is almost pathologically irrational), so that doesn't mean a myopic suit might not erroneously decide that they might as well hire cheap labor overseas. Still though, it's really not something I spend any time worrying about.

What I do find interesting, and you alluded to this a bit, is the set of companies who do not allow work-from-home (or, allow work-from-home but do not allow truly remote employees - this seems to be so common these days), may collectively realize "wait a second, we all worked from home during this massive global pandemic and things didn't grind to a screeching halt, maybe remote work isn't something to be afraid of". That would be a really interesting development.

> we all worked from home during this massive global pandemic and things didn't grind to a screeching halt, maybe remote work isn't something to be afraid of". That would be a really interesting development.

This serves as an ancillary move on the proverbial corporate chess board though. The next step sets them up to remove a large burden in allowing remote employees- but “remote” can mean anything, including overseas labor

I don't think that all companies will be able to get good productivity from their employees working from home. Success would require a combination of motivated, self-disciplined employees who are good at communicating efficiently, and managers who are able to manage such employees. This, unfortunately, is not universally available across all companies.

The companies that fail at their WFH experiments will not want to continue with remote work after it's no longer necessary.

> “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails”

Unfortunately, that's not what's happening where I work. We're having as many meetings as before (maybe even more, in the name of promoting company cohesion), but they're now being done via teleconferencing software.

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