It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case).

I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.

COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.