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Comment by jeffwask | Hacker News Reader

This is why I think Executives are terrified of remote work. If the local theater doesn't want to meet my demand I have a global theater and someone will be always willing to leverage their competitive advantage to secure talent that would typically not be in their talent pool. People are no longer trapped by their geography or situation and Executives are terrified of losing that control.

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Which is weird because they now have more control than ever in reality.

Previously, if you headed up a tech firm in Wyoming, for example, your talent pool was the set of all the residents in Wyoming. You'd struggle to retain your top-end talent and you probably had to overpay to get them to stick around. Even worse, you probably had to donate to the University of Wyoming (read: bribe) to get them to train their students the way you needed them trained.

With remote work, you just scribble out a post on Indeed, wait a week, and then pick the most desperate candidate that has the qualifications you need. If they threaten to leave, you offer a token raise knowing that you could always find someone else if you need.

That firm in Wyoming already had the ability to hire remotely 5 and 10 years ago. All they had to do was decide to do it.

I guess there's more remote work talent and more remote work culture around now though

Everyone learned (the hard way) how to be productive while working remotely

They previously had to make their whole « internal processes » (for lack of a better term) remote-friendly, which wasn’t probably the case back then. When you build a physical-first team, your documentation, your newcomer-induction trainings, your typical way of sharing and bonding, those will all be relying on physical presence. That makes onboarding of full-remote colleagues terribly challenging, « doomed to fail » I’d even say. Being remote-friendly is an important effort that requires you to actually become remote-first. And this effort is only considered, started and approved by executives now that the global context has totally changed because of COVID. At least in the tech industry, there’s no coming back, and people at the top of the company, even if fighting on some details, are totally getting that.

So yes, my analysis is that, because of those fundamental « remote-friendly » changes, companies embracing the new normal can compete in a larger pool, which offers opportunities as well as challenges. Companies - in the IT domain - fighting this trend will only make their life terrible and eventually abide by the new rules (hey Apple! :))

Your point (first sentence) is totally valid - thanks for sharing it! -, but you then make it polarizing by getting emotional (« bribe », « desperate »), hence the down-voting, I guess.

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