sortof yes, sortof no.
Aside from all the conversation about work culture, state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work. States hate losing tax revenue. Notoriously, it is easier to register to do business in a state than to unregister. This is even harder internationally.
For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + taxation, and every state and country under the sun's paperwork + regs + taxation. That is a real burden. Not just the paperwork + administrative overhead, but being subject to differing employment + everything else laws from *everywhere* will really muck up ability to run a consistent business.
While fully remote startups can now access services to help with this, like PEO providers like Justworks/Deel, the reality is that most of the world is not setup to accept this at scale. I run a fully remote startup and still run into issues with vendor diligence departments and accounts etc. expecting us to have a physical office, and being totally bewildered when we don't. The people involved now understand remote work, but the systems --forms, insurances, tax nexus decisions, etc -- still very much aren't setup to handle it.
Notably: if you are a bigger company, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube with all these local governments, and you bet that every locality will be trying to extract tax dollars from the big firms with deeper pockets.
The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs.
Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all.
(I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)
I've gotten by just fine for the past few years but we are starting to see more questions about this that require us to change our legal address away from a residence. I think we got away without much trouble solely because of the pandemic, and now it's over we're going to see a lot more questions about this.
It's not worth the future of the whole business to fight big vendors/customers over addresses.
I'd probably just setup a cheap DID number with someone like VOIP.ms and have it go straight to voicemail.
I agree though, it's not a fight you should have fight. Office phones are going the way of the fax machine.
This is a real burden for small businesses. The nature of Amazon's business as an online retailer with a massive distribution network means that for any significant market they do business in, they will have employees. Practically speaking, this is a solved problem for any state in which Amazon has a warehouse (which I think is probably all of them for the US?).
The issue of state tax breaks was such a big deal during their "HQ2" contest a few years ago that it actually became one of the top issues in the NYC elections that year. (to a large extent local candidate races became a referendum on how they felt about giving tax breaks to amazon in exchange for Amazon's commitments to employ a certain # of highly paid software + product people who would potentially contribute to the overall tax base. NYC people ended up electing politicians to stop the previously-negotiated pending deal with amazon, and amazon got enough blowback to say 'we give up' publicly.
What percentage of remote-workers are in a different tax-jurisdiction? Especially post-COVID I expected that the majority of remote-work involved people already in the same US state, merely with a nontrivial commute.
Not as close as a daily commute, though.
I live 60 miles from my office. It's just not practical to go in every day, so I go in once a week. I can also go in as needed, such as if there's a special guest, event, ect.
I wish I could go in every day, but where I live is a compromise with my wife, and we have kids.
If I were to go in everyday, I'd need to be much, much closer to the office. It wouldn't work for my family: Single incomes don't work very well near my office.
But I also have a short commute and a nice office.
Suburbs cannot function without freeways, but the presence of freeways harm the property values of city neighborhoods not suburban ones.
SFH simply produces less tax revenue than an entire apartment building by land, so any statewide social services (education, freeway maintenance...) is paid proportionately more by cities than by SFH.
There are reports[0] of cities reporting that their SFH actually loses them money due to the fact they simply don't pay their fair share of taxes vs all the infrastructure they use.
It's not like the government is going "oh boy, SFH mom, here's 500$ plucked straight from some inner city mom's payroll taxes". But in the broader system of supporting many people's living styles through greater societal infrastructure, less-dense housing like suburbs do not put out as much as they take.
[0]https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e... [Town of Nolensville, TN]
I've lived in SFH on the edge of a major city and on the edge of farmland and there's a wide gulf in the level of infrastructure that they had access to, and also a significant difference in the amount of tax that was owed. It's hard for me to believe that those two very different scenarios are functionally equivalent.
Moreover, vast swathes of the city I used to live next to, despite having significantly higher tax rates, were ultimately paying a lot less in tax due to severely depressed income levels and property values. There might have been a higher mean revenue per acre in the city as a whole, but there also was a much higher variance.
They work because they are mostly newish. Core functions like keeping roads functional rely on state and federal aid.
Many older suburbs are more in decline now. Especially in 2nd/3rd tier metro areas. It’s just less obvious than the inner city or rural areas. They need growth to thrive. Once they fill out, population ages out, schools decline, and a vicious cycle starts.
Money policy has kept that going by organizing the economy around real estate. I don’t think it’s sustainable to continually recapitalize single family homes.
As an example - city water vs Water wells & Septic tank/fields. Gravel roads without sidewalks, etc.
So it's not 100% evident that cities subsidize rural counties. Cities do provide the larger tax base for states, which probably subsidize more rural counties through incentives tied to certain rural activities, but making a blanket statement is probably not accurate.
The infrastructure relies on state support, which is usually from Federal funds and personal income tax. That aid is a transfer payment from cities to localities. Bigger states, bigger transfer. Also, the federal funds are sourced from bigger states to the smaller states.
Thats one of the amazing things about the US. The wealth of the coasts ensured that the smaller states weren’t left behind.
I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.
While the conclusion — that most people do their best work when in the office — may be correct, why do you think that the cause of that is the boss breathing down people's necks rather than, say, more efficient collaboration among team members?
My personal observations of my team over the past couple of years are that people are much more engaged, issues get resolved much quicker, and information radiates much better when team members are co-located. This is something that many were in agreement on before covid.
> This is something that many were in agreement on before covid
This is an excellent observation worth highlighting: Google's belief stems not just from pre-COVID / post-COVID observation but from the relative output of teams that were same-office colocated vs. inter-office located, necessitating videoconferencing, chat, and email to get work done. Now that you highlight that, I think my reasoning is in error and it's probably more about collaboration being easier in-person. But inconveniently for those who don't want to work in person, the end-result is the same.