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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

I question the competency of any CEO that enforces people return to the office on a whim.

We have crossed the rubicon on remote work. The shift has been well and truly paradigmed.

To choose to restrict your candidate pool to a small geographical location, pay relocation, pay higher salaries, have a lower employee NPS, have higher company carbon emissions, whilst your competitors have a much larger non-geographically constrained talent pool, with more attractive, flexible, family-friendly working conditions and pay less for those employees, making their companies more competitive.

It’s a no-brainer. The status quo has completely shifted. Any CEO that doesn’t yet realize that should consider quitting.

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I'm rather amazed at the short-sightedness of the highly paid engineers here who don't see the dangers of full remote actually being adopted.

If a company is no longer limited to just hiring people physically nearby, then you're competing for jobs against a whole lot of people who'd accept much lower salaries.

Companies already do that anyway. But they still need to hire people in the same timezone more or less.

Some companies do, but most don't as they have trouble managing remote workers. Forcing companies to become good at it eliminates what few barriers keep them from follow suit.

Timezones are a barrier, but 650 million people live within three timezones of the SF Bay Area.

It's almost inconceivable to me that companies would go fully remote and not over time adjust salary downwards to something more like the median demands of the available labor force (i.e., those whose workday fits within a 8:00-6:00 window.

I live in the Bay Area, but if I moved back to the low cost of living area I'm from with low income taxes, I'd come out ahead even with 30% pay cut. I like living in a HCOL area, so I'm not happy about fully remote work.

The most I can hope for is that the wage drop doesn't too far outpace the concomitant drop in the cost of living in these expensive areas.

What is happening is people who are being forced into RTO are demanding a higher salary. Basic supply and demand dynamics are coming into play. Those CEOs are now learning this perhaps the (not surprising) hard way.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240322-us-salaries-hi...

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