Permanently remote workers seen doubling in 2021 due to pandemic productivity

I think the other issue is that middle managers see that people working from home barely interact with them, which means that their middle man role is visibly unnecessary. A recipe for getting scared.

At my company we recently had an incident related to the recent WFH with a subcontractor in India. He was providing his credentials to another contractor who impersonated him, which is something that he probably would not have tried in the office!

Although maybe he would have tried it, because the impersonator called into meetings and everyone noticed that he sounded completely different (had much better English) and the work was different (less skilled)! If it was me, I would be checking the sub-sub-contractors work and at a minimum calling into meetings myself ;)

This is an often recurring argument on this subject.

For example, I don't care about having a big garden but I don't necessarily enjoy living in a dense city. If I could WFH at least three days a week for the foreseeable future, I would gladly move to a town in the suburbs where I could have a bigger apartment for the price of my studio apartment. I bet a lot of people would do the same. This would lessen the pressure on housing in the city center, so people like you who actually prefer living in the big city for reasons other than work could afford larger apartments.

My main reason for living where I do is so that my commute is less than 30 minutes each way.

I guess the point is that as the constraint of everyone working in the same place is reduced, there will be less people wanting to live in the city allowing better conditions for those who do.

I thought the same for years and chased that dream. Eventually I found I ended up as a miserable isolationist to some degree. So roll on a number of years and I’ve got 5 people living in a tiny house in London. I sleep, eat, work and play in one room and have done for about 10 years now. It’s great and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

The important thing is that you find activities to do outside the house because it doesn’t matter how big your space is; you need to get away from it sometimes.

Working remotely doesn't have to mean working from home. You could be working from a rented office or shared office space, friends, a hotel and so on.

What's great is the flexibility and customization for each individual employee.

Being forced to work from home is better than being forced to work from an office. In the former case, you can (and I did) rent an office, join a coworking space, work from coffee shops, etc. In the latter case, you have one choice and one choice only, and that choice sucks for a whole lot of folks.

That's a great argument for pushing employers to be prepared to provide an allowance for office space (whether to cover costs of adjusting your home, or for membership at a co-working space convenient for you). We don't need to go back to centralised offices to solve that issue.

I lived downtown for years while working remote for companies in different cities. Not going to the office made it even easier to enjoy the city imo.

Thanks for writing this out as you've really hit the nail on the head. I manage a medium sized team and I can tell you some people are totally cool with just being a worker bee. I wish more of the conversation around WFH focused on how everyone is different, one size fits all rarely works, and if you do want to "get ahead" you'll need to put in face time. Period. Humans are social and want connection. Meritocracies are great in principal, but that's just plainly not how the world works. If you want managerial carrier development and growth, you have to put in the face time.

Managing a split remote/local team is one of the hardest things to do. Nigh-impossible I'd say.

Your last point about career development is an interesting one that comes up. If you are remote but your co-workers are interacting in person I can see how there would be an informational advantage in favor of your co-workers that is unavoidable.

My preference is to WFH most of the time, but not all the time. When WFH for awhile, I can much more easily get into a zen-like state of concentration after an hour or so that is extremely difficult to get in an office. At the office I have to contend with constant sources of distractions and interruptions (people walking up on foot, phone ringing, non-work related discussion, ...) which has often made me feel like the only time I can push through a hard problem is during off-hours when no one is around. Most importantly, being in a zen-like state while working and getting stuff done is what makes work enjoyable for me.

That said, whenever there is a significant amount of collaboration or a need for a lot of round-trip communication with someone (new employee, need to bring someone up to speed, ...) it's better in person - but I find this to be only an occasional need.

Putting aside the 4000 GBP (5200 USD) I no longer have to pay each year for the privilege of taking the train to work, I would definitely trade a significant amount of career success for a lifetime working from home. It's so, so good.

Obviously others have a different take, but I can see myself never going into the office regularly again.

How are you ever unwinding if you do work around the clock? For me I'm quickly feeling stress symptoms if I start to do work tasks after hours. I have a family too, so in theory it would be great for me too to do family stuff in the middle of the day and then return to work in the evening. But in practice if I do that, work will soon intrude my dreams, my mood worsens and I have less energy.

I understand the desire to work with people face to face, but regarding the lack of downtime on your commute: have you considered simply reading at home, or going to a coffee shop for an hour before/after work? I've found replacing my 1 hour subway journey with a 45 minute walk around the neighborhood with a podcast to be much better for my wellbeing

Clock in when you would normally arrive at work, and clock out when you would leave. Even my employer, a big, ancient, conservative firm, has started telling employees to set boundaries.

That's what I miss.

I used to commute by train basically 2.5h daily, so I could spend that on e.g reading books

But on the other hand vision of waking up around 8:30 instead of 7, and then being at home around 16:30 instead of 18 is so good.

I just need to improve my work ethics(personal, not an actual work)

I think the best trade off is like 2-3 days of WFH and the rest on site.

Then just don't do that

The ability to switch from work to personal time is something everyone either learns by themselves or is eventually forced to learn after burning out.

A few colleagues use their commute time to take a walk around the block, that gets them in "work mode". And after they clock out they do the same in reverse.

Did someone force you to spend this hour in front of the screen? Its up to you to decide what to do with the 1 hour you used to spend commuting.

Can you go outside with a book at all? Even if you live in an apartment, there should be either some shared courtyard space or a balcony. Even just going out into the hall. That's basically what students did when I was in the dorms at college. Put some physical space between you and your work environment.

I live in a house, so I can just take a seat on the patio out back (as long as it's not cold or raining like it is today), but there should be some equivalent. Do that for an hour then go back into your apartment and sign in for work.

So just wrap up the day? What about if something happens when you "wrapped" your day up? Or someone got a question?

You still need to be at the computer, same as in the office.

Ack, thanks. Corrected.

In the western European country I live in, everyone was pushing for more and more outsourcing. Initially India but they started using eastern EU countries as well which was cheaper but didn't have e.g. timezone issues. They're mostly pulling back to in-country. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but if the issue is about work quality then I don't see why that changes now.

Anyway, fearing getting replaced by outsourcing is like fearing to get replaced by robots. Maybe it will happen in the end but if so, we never could have stopped it anyway. If it's the right direction and we should pursue it.

No, you underestimate issues that come with hiring someone from another country.

I am not going to hire an accountant from Vietnam to do my taxes even if I would be able to pay him $1 instead of $100. Accountant from Vietnam is not going to learn US or some EU country tax code if he has customers in Vietnam. In case something goes wrong, like you would have to go to court to settle things, good luck on getting someone from other side of globe to the court and setting things straight.

Local regulations, local language plays huge role in a lot of jobs that can be done remotely. But they will be done 'local' remotely so you still compete locally not globally.

You already have been for decades at this point. The high salaries seen in some places is not due exclusively to locality but the quality of the employee.

What I'm seeing is people from low cost locations which traditionally migrated as soon as they could to get western salaries are not getting those western salaries without having to leave. I would say if you were at the highest compensation level you may see a decrease but it will remain that the best command large salaries as now. The difference will probably be that some who were the best and underpaid will have an easier time getting reasonable compensation and some people who were taking advantage of locality factors will now approach a more reasonable salary for their actual contribution.

This depends on your experience level and the position. In my experience on the senior end it doesn't mean pay goes down, it means getting the job is much more competitive.

Some positions, such as junior dev, may have reduced pay since there are millions of international lower skilled devs.

I think you can make really strong arguments for productivity both being higher than normal times (due to overwork, less options for non-work activities, etc.) and lower than normal (due to additional childcare responsibilities, overall stress level, etc.). I think both make a good case for the OP's point that the current situation is not indicative of what we'll be able to sustain long-term, both good and bad.

Personally, I think the biggest thing my team discovered was how much of our work was actually able to be done remotely. We were all averaging roughly one day a week work from home, but I expect to be more like 2-3 long-term.