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The competitive disadvantage RTO companies have is trying to hire locally.

We have the pick of the best engineers from around the country (in some cases, world) because we pay bay area (startup adjusted) salaries regardless of where you live. The team is top notch - probably the best I’ve ever worked with.

So yeah - a cost to maintaining comms culture, but the payoff can be pretty nonlinear.

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My counter argument would be that a lot of the world’s best people move to hubs anyway to intentionally be around other great people.

So being located in the Bay Area gets you the world’s best people without the negative tradeoffs of remote.

That said, I think your point is valid for startups located outside of hubs. If your company would otherwise be located in rural South Dakota (or even a decent sized non-hub city), then yes - remote is more compelling for the reasons you state. Whether that’s a competitive advantage on net given the downsides is not clear to me.

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