Silicon Valley finds remote work is easier to begin than end

After working remotely for 5 years, it would take an extremely special team and compensation to draw me back into an in-person role. I live in a medium-sized town and would be hard-pressed to relocate at this point. The local tech scene just can’t compete with remote salaries, and life without a commute is just too good. I’ve had enough happy hours and office snacks for one lifetime.

Good. This remote work revolution has had a dramatic effect on diversity in a positive way. My company’s learnings have been that it’s easier to hire a diverse workforce remotely, and our revenue and margin numbers have never been higher.

We’ve gone from “oh it’s our culture, we can’t wait to get everyone back in the office” to realizing we had hired almost half of the current employees in the company since the pandemic started so we moved on to consolidating office leases.

There is no going back to the “old ways” because we had simply grown too much for anyone but the tenured folks to remember. And we can grow faster because we’re primarily remote — we plan to hire about 2,000 people next year, 50% more than we had planned pre-pandemic (which should be a huge red flag for anyone looking to force employees back — they’re not bluffing about remote jobs being plentiful and we have lower overhead so we pay more.)

All of our work is collaborative. It’s actually far easier to be collaborative at scale if everyone is virtual; just the only baseline anyone had was when the bosses and half the workers were in the same room. Sure, the bosses felt good, but half your team was underutilized. The collaboration angle is absolute BS.

My company is going back to the office two days of the week out of five. I can choose to go back three and get a reserved seat, which is weirdly tempting. I hate the idea of having to find a temporary seat.

But it's also tempting to just work from home, something they allow individuals to do on request. They used to be pretty relaxed about allowing that, and if there's one thing COVID has taught me it's that everyone's jobs still get done even without having to mingle in an office together. But who knows, maybe they're cutting that avenue off now, I haven't checked.

My commute was pretty annoying pre-COVID -- between 1.5h to 2h of driving a day was common. I don't miss that at all. That's time for reading, time for playing with the dog or the rabbits, time for cleaning the horrible mess my fiancee makes when cooking dinner. I've found it a lot harder to keep up with podcasts now, though ...

I work at a startup born during Covid that has never had an office. Everyone is effective, collaboration is good, and we are getting great traction. No need for an office and the company recognizes that fortunately.

Everyone is hopeful about continuing remote work in the comments, but my job isn’t allowing that option to anyone. I want to maintain remote work, but it’s not possible to shift atm, in my current situation, and the commute would be over an hour.

Disappointed to say the least.

My company never really went remote. I would more describe it as office-from-home. And most are going back to the office 4 days a week.

We have lost several staff - mostly younger ones - by going remote first. Although we kept our office locations, they have downsized dramatically and few people use them. They usually feel very empty. However trying to unbake that loaf would, I am certain, drain even more staff, perhaps even an order of magnitude more.

Let's be honest. Without accountibility from co-workers/managers, there will be people that will spend more time doing other things other than work, like browsing HN and commeting on a post.