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Just want to provide a counter-story to your anecdote. Many of my colleagues are excited to go back to the office to increase collaboration and work satisfaction. Personally, wfh is really difficult for me and I can't wait to get back in the office. Working from home feels like grinding away at an endless list of tasks and waiting for the day to be over. Working at an office feels like playing a sport with a team - every day is significantly more enjoyable and satisfying.

Granted: I am a young, single person working in design/product and my job requires a ton of collaboration. I don't really consider myself an extrovert FWIW

But this is just a reason why you should go back to the office, not why someone who feels differently should.

Personally I think being junior is so so difficult to do remotely. It must be insanely hard to get things done and have the confidence to organise people who are more senior than you to have those random conversations and exploration meetings that make a product worthwhile (and that you can learn from). It is possible but you need to manufacture the spontaneity if you see what I mean. Most of the people who love WFH seem to be very advanced in their careers.

Oh, those Extroverts. They don't understand what working means except it brings them social joy.

I've been effectively remote (albeit with a lot of work travel) for a number of years now and won't ever return to an office. That said, and appreciating that it's a different world from a few decades ago in terms of comms and so forth, it feels to me that coming out of school and shortly thereafter and being in this situation would have been extremely difficult.

The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)

One of the reasons I went with a 99% remote job. I'm an hour from the office. There's nothing I can't do from home a vast majority of the time, but the proximity to the office means that when there is value in me showing up, I can, on very short notice. They definitely paid me more for that ability, even though they were fine with me only planning on coming in maybe once a quarter. And I like that I'll still be getting some face time.

Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.

People have been making this threat for decades now but here is the thing: you always get what you pay for.

High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.

The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.

You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.

> you always get what you pay for.

This isn't true. Yeah statistically maybe. In practice if you are willing to endure some hassle you can save a lot of money by using offshore freelancerds/contractors. However it requires lots of patience and also depends on the field.

Most people hire locals because they want to feel comfortable. It is just nicer to communicate with someone from the same culture, and it is easier to trust that guy.

Well, you could still arbitrage expenses. In SF a highly paid developer is paying $4-5K a month on rent and another $1-2K on food - the same developer living in India would probably be paying 1/10th of that sum for the same expenses. Plus taxes and such. I'm not sure what the delta really comes out to though.

> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people

Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?

Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?

It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.

[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732

I hesitate to earmark this as competence, but what I see again and again is that my colleagues in Asia (India, China, Russia on one occasion) have a much higher tolerance for pain than the majority of their North American and Western European contemporaries.

This is not a good thing. The dominant form of 'bullshit' in code is pointlessly self-inflicted pain, and so people who don't hit the 'enough is enough' point are wallowing in bullshit code most of the time, and writing more bullshit the rest of the time. We politely call this 'accidental complexity' to water it down and not point fingers. It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate, or thoughtless.

Anyone who hits the 'enough' point now starts to consider high threshold people as mess-makers. As being less than 1x employees (worst case, -x employees). Doing that kind of janitorial work for long is a quick road to burnout. It's taking and challenging to explain to people that 'okay' is not universal and just because you think something is 'okay' doesn't mean anyone else does and as you work on a team you need to adjust your levels to match expectations.

I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of effort involved in getting something done by someone locally to someone remote.

Time zone is the first hurdle. Although, in my opinion, this can still be overcome in a relative short period of time.

The second hurdle is familiarity with work culture and style. For a person who's worked already in your office, knows the system, knows all the procedures, knows the nooks an crannies of how all the softwares behave, who to call in case of issues, how to resolve them. All these aspects add to a significant amount of non-quantifiable knowledge which lots of organizations don't consider while outsourcing initially.

The third is process. Most organizations have their processes worked out over time. And this is rarely, if ever, documented. Even for people coming to office, there's a certain amount of time till they get familiar with this.

However, the biggest challenge is communication. This means everything - grammar, vocabulary, diction, accent, familiarity with jargon, parts of speech, colloquialisms, everything. To make a requirement understood itself is a challenge. Asking questions about that requirement when faced with a roadblock, is again a bottleneck.

As an Indian, who's worked in most of the English speaking countries, and now working from India, I can just humbly say this - never outsource to cut costs. This will bite you hard in the short run. Only if you have processes set, softwares used correctly, procedures documented, should you look into outsourcing. And that too it should be for reasons other than purely financial. As an example, having remote workers across time zones helps in maintaining support for your global customers better. Similarly, time zone differences can be used to your advantage. Finally, interacting with different cultures can only improve your organization's awareness, maturity, communication and global reach.

Since my dad ran a software company, I've been hearing these worries about jobs moving to India etc... for most of my life. I worried about it 20 years ago, worried about it 15 years ago, and I don't worry about it anymore. As other commenters have said, not only has the pay gap for skilled engineers diminished significantly over that time, but there are other significant barriers to offshoring.

But that's always been true. And companies are going to do that if they can, regardless if we WfH or WfW. More than a few of us have seen the mass firings, and training some barely-comprehensible foreign workers, whom wreck the place, and then the company calls and begs us to come back.

That's literally the same argument about the "Fight for $15" - the argument is 'yer gonna get automated'. That's going to happen no matter what.

There are still barriers to truly global labour - time zones, language barriers, complicated tax systems etc. I'm in New Zealand where there's little overlap in working hour time zones with most major markets.

This is why it's good to be a lawyer. It's one of the last remaining guilds of knowledge workers with any power. It's literally illegal to have someone from wherever do certain tasks if they are not properly licensed.

There are Indian universities that specialize in US law and train their students in US law. Law firms that have those lawyers work overnight on items that in the past were given to new grads. Experienced lawyers then review those documents, fix any issues, and put their signature on the document.

You could argue that there still has to be a US lawyer in the loop, but that's still true of software projects as well, that there is one Sr. software person overseeing the outsourced team.

It's not /that/ good. Due to the high supply of lawyers, the compensation is heavily bimodal: https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

That's one good reason to be a lawyer. However, if you speak with actual attorneys, they all have a hundred reasons to not become a lawyer. I have yet to find one that recommends it as a career path.

I know a patent lawyer and a divorce lawyer who really like their work. The patent lawyer is an ex-engineer and likes the technology. The divorce lawyer is a funny jerky guy and loves all the drama. It's not for everyone though.

If you want a laugh about why not to be a lawyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs-UEqJ85KE

Plenty of typical lawyer work is ripe for automation.

Lawyers do a lot of work where their licence is not really needed.

I'm not sure I'd classify licensed professions as rare, frankly most US states have an overabundance of occupational licensing in my view.

I would point you at board certified doctors.

Their work isn't remote though.

In the immediate term, instead of competing with people in a 60 square mile radius, you have to compete against the rest of the country. That’s great if you are really good at what you do. If you aren’t, it isn’t.

Also remote workers are easier to automate because employers know precisely what they are doing.

Just wait for the mass exodus.

Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace.

At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.

If remote work is a winning concept on the market, why we needed coronavirus crisis for it to get adopted? Are markets not working?

Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few.

Inertia, perhaps. We certainly have been seeing reports of digital nomads growing over the last decade, but major shocks can be useful in speeding up transitions. Likely very few CEOs previously imagined how robust the remote work infrastructure had become, and certainly didn't have obvious incentive to implement all the tools until now.

> Markets are not optimized for quality of life. It's one variable of many in a system evolved to coerce the many to benefit the few.

You need enough buy in from enough companies to actually have a competitive market for remote work. I think things were moving in that direction but slowly (as things tend to do) - COVID just accelerated the trend.

I hear Dublin is already draining and the real estate market folding. The latter a very good thing for non-expats of course.

I found this as a source: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Ireland/Home-Pric...

Adjusted for inflation it does look like it was down a bit during last year, but Q1 there seems to be a rise again. What's interesting is that it looks like the Dublin prices have seen a wild 10 years of volatility.

Nope, maybe a 2% drop in prices from the peak, rent still crazy expensive and not falling, once the government remove rent freezes, it will go up again. Anecdotally a few non Irish techies are leaving but it won't be enough to affect house prices and there are 10k people waiting to buy behind them.

No they won't. The very reason of the management chain is manage people, in arm distance, not remotely. The execs understand this best kept secret better than anyone else.

Yes to all of this. My personal feeling is WFH is a threat to those who actors who need the office as a place to be seen.

The existing managers all got where they are now by navigating the office environment.

A best kept secret finally got exposed thanks to the prolonged pandemic related wfh, an unprecedented awakening.

> 4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.

I don't think this is fair characterisation. If you have kids, working from home can be quite stressful.

> And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.

Generally almost no one gives a shit if you work from home or not. The only one caring about that is your employer, and you should negotiate with your employer about that. No need to complain about everyone and everything if you can't find an employer willing to let you work remote.

On point 4, I think this is where co-working spaces have a moment to shine. A fully remote environment that you still get to leave the house to go to and no impact on how the rest of the team live their lives.

College was by far the best time in my life because of the environment of campus, even with the pitiful dorm room sizing and sub-average dining options. If I could move to a campus - perhaps that was focused on people in their thirties - where people from many companies would go to work remotely and live, that would be an absolute game-changer for me.

I feel exactly the same way. College had just the right amount of private space, lots of shared spaces for social occasions / group working and a maintenance department to look after all the tedious domestic repairs. Bliss

I think it really comes down to urban planning and the burden of most people's commutes. Worth noting that from my experience the interpersonal negativity index of my previous work environments is highly correlated with longer commute times and larger city size.

If I were running a large company I would create many small satellite offices around the metro area that employees could sign up to work from. Might even be worth purchasing a few large RVs and renting space and power hookups in good locations while figuring out employee preferences.

5. People who don't want to compete with a global pool of workers

Those initial waves of offshoring were nothing compared with what COVID did. Wait until this affects labor prices.

Labor prices are up y/y for four straight quarters in the USA, with no signs of slowing down.

And your last sentence says it all. Somehow all these people want/require everyone else to come back to the office which is just unfair.

Spot on. The management is having an existential crisis when butts are not in seats and everything appeared to work just fine.

>> productivity increased

Did it, though? GDP has just reached pre-pandemic levels.

The economy is not 100% office work.

Worker productivity is not measured in GDP. It is a component of it, but asset and resource prices also factor into the equation. Nobody is going to suggest taxi drivers can go fully remote and work from home, yet that still feeds into GDP.

GDP is at pre pandemic levels now with sizable sections of the economy (travel, restaurants etc) still operating well below capacity.