Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?
I am pretty extroverted and derive a lot of meaning and enjoyment from working with people IRL, not just across a Slack connection. My previous job went from tolerable to intolerable as a result of the pandemic caused 100% WFH. These days it's hard to find an in office job, and even when you do, it feels like that would be s red flag anyway, since WFH is seen as a perk by most, or realistically I worry I'm going to go in to the office and be the only one there.
I just like being able to grab lunch with coworkers and shoot the shit. I find i care more about my work when I feel more connected to the other people who are affected by it.
(BTW I don't mind partial WFH, thats just obviously beneficial for everyone.)
Are those days just over? Am I doing / thinking about this wrong in some way? Is it not as bad as I think? Are there places out there for weirdos like me?
265 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadI feel similarly about remote but with a couple of differences:
- I'm not extroverted all, I still vastly prefer office over remote.
- It's not about socialising, I find the work itself much better when I can meet my coworkers in person.
Yeah I think this is an important point. I would still kinda call this "socializing" I think, but there's a huge difference between "just having people to talk about random stuff with" socializing and "interacting with the people I'm spending most of my time working with, talking about the things we're working on" socializing.
I have to say, this setup has set the bar pretty high. I manage to go the gym before work, have lunch outside with coworkers or have a beer after without being too tired from the commute or too isolated in my own apartment.
It helps a lot when you're living in the center of a city.
if you are in the US, we already start to see some of the big corps (not only FAANG) start to talk about return to office and sanctions vs non vaccinated workers (probably "prep work" for return to office)
optimistic POV - more and more companies will open their offices on non-mandatory basis in H1. Every new variant and every new case in some office will delays/pause this but it will happen
I think companies are doing this to just show up in more searches.
If it’s any consolation, that’s not strange at all. Full remote jobs are actually very rare still, despite all of the headlines and comments suggesting that office work has been ended by COVID.
In-office or partial in-office is still the norm for the vast majority of jobs.
On the general search, “EU” might not be specific enough, as different countries in EU still have wildly differing employment policies, some of which are uncompetitive when an employer can easily choose to avoid them. The Netherlands and France are both “EU” but worlds apart in terms of employment policies.
But it could be kind of expensive if you're an entry level developer at Paris or Nice salaries.
I also found other coffee shop that are more work focused. They are usually more spacious and with big shared tables. They mind less if you don't consume regularly. Of course, that's always as long as they don't get overly busy. In general you will notice if your presence is a "problem", you will be asked if you want to consume more.
Edit: I'm located in Prague, CZ.
Depending on your job function and industry. For tech, yes, those days are over for at least for another 5 to 10 years, is my guess. COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much. It will also weed out bad people managers who need to "see" people physically who need to "get a feel" as a management metric.
The only major factor that would swing the pendulum back into offices, is when future diseases get under control much more quickly - whether that's corona virus or the next version of it, H1N1, avian flu, MERS, covid-19, etc. When the population is smart enough to win those battles quickly, and that there's a company where in-person teams outperform remote teams by a large margin, that's when in-person will be back and the pendulum swing again.
Is that a personal observation of yours, or has this now become "fact"? The reason I ask is that I would like to find studies - not just surveys or anecdotal evidence - that attempt to quantify the quality and productivity of WFH since the recently pandemic changes.
At work, we've had countless discussions about this and the jury is still out. The introverts claim to be no less than twice as productive, the extroverts claim they are lying and they really miss leaving work early on Fridays to go to the pub - somehow that makes them better employees. Management hate not being able to peer over your shoulder (although they have recently installed "security" software on everyone's laptops for "security purposes"). But I have nothing to point to other than my own experience managing a remote team of devs.
I've yet to come to a solid conclusion as to how it works for others. I only know that my productivity and depth of work has never been greater. So if there are any resources you could point me to I'd be grateful.
I used to have this when I was employed (about 20 years ago). Somehow my personal take was that it gets tiring pretty fast. I've had enough friends outside of employment and wit the very rare exception would very much prefer to socialize with them rather than coworkers.
I then went on my own and have never looked back. The fact that I am doing quite ok means that I am productive. I design and implement new software products for my own company or for clients.
This might be over-estimating the numeracy and relative risk-judgment of people.
(I am commenting outside of the constraints of the pandemic. Covid obviously makes it much harder.)
Early in the pandemic ( Mar 2020 ) -> no one knows how to WFH as a team. There is insanity in the world and work takes a backburner for most people.
Mid-Pandemic (Fall 2020) -> Companies push workers to get back to productivity and deliver. Workers are used to the remote world and productivity returns to normal.
Current ( Fall 2021) -> Workers just seem tired. Retention is through the floor, leadership is skiddish of pushing new projects in case people leave.
I'm not sure where we'll be in Summer 2022, but my suspicion is that workers aren't getting something they used to have in the office. Personally, I'm probably signing up for a co-working space in the new year to have something vibrant to look forward too and hopefully some other engineers to chat tech with on occasion.
I do miss the whiteboard and "bouncing idea" conversations.
I agree with most of your assessment. I particularly like the focus on fatigue. I think this tiredness (in oh so many ways) has yet to be fully understood - not to mention, addressed. If I may be so bold, I'll go one step further: something has got to give! People can't be tired all the time. Something has to (and will) change. Here's hoping that in 2022 it'll be largely for the better.
As for the whiteboard, I humbly offer our team's answer: https://sharetheboard.com We too couldn't bear to be whiteboard-less and have come up with at least a partial solution. If you have time to kick the tires on it, I'd love some feedback.
All the best in the New Year!
0) What data is shared through your servers?
1) What video conference tools does this support?
2) Can I use a mobile phone to capture the whiteboard?
0 is the most important part for my current employer as we can't use any tools which share any data with third parties without a lengthy approval process. If there is a guarantee that the app doesn't share data with a third party then it can more easily be tested at a team level (somewhat of a unique requirement for large tech companies).
Feedback on the experience: I tested out the tool from my personal linux machine (Razer blade 15) using a hand written note pad.
0) The experience is really promising
1) I can't hold a notepad steady enough for the video to capture the text appropriately, flipping the notepad around to write more text removes the existing text from the space.
2) I had to hold the notepad within ~6 inches of the laptop camera to have the pen/handwritten text appear clearly. This could be due to the quality of the laptop camera - which is certainly inferior to my iphone 12 pro's camera, and my work machines MBP 16 inch camera.
3) Overall I'd give it a proper test with my coworkers if not for the data sharing/video conference requirements of my current employer.
Thanks for taking the time to test out the app. Really appreciate the thoughtful feedback. In answer to your questions:
0) In short, unless you volunteer to share data - to get a discount or to use the free version - no data is shared (for your company test, simply use a Trial of the Starter version and you should be good to go).
We do track (anonymous) UI clicks, essentially to make sure the app is working. If this is prohibiting you from a broader pilot, contact me and we'll figure something out.
1) "Integration" with video conferencing currently relies on screen sharing: so.. it supports all tools! We are working on a few platform-specific integrations and would love your feedback here.
2) The primary use case is board (whiteboard, blackboard, flipchart, etc.) sharing - usually via a laptop or some external camera. We will be supporting a mobile version but to do it justice we'll need to release some apps. The amount of real-time processing going on already is quite ambitious; adding a useful image stabilization or surface detection to be executed in a browser has proven too heavy for most devices. That said, we may release a thinned-down version for mobile capturing before we do the apps (waiting on some POCs to inform this).
To sum up, for your broader test, I'd recommend: - using the Trial (of the Starter version) - using a laptop (or external cam) pointed at a whiteboard
And contact me at "marcin" [at] sharetheboard.com if you have any special requests or follow-ups. Would love to get feedback from your team!
Lockdown has certainly damaged some industries, but it has also taught a generation of people tech things they probably would have retired without learning, and the value of that may exceed everything else long term. It is very difficult to isolate things like this, and we wont get another sample, even if we get another pandemic later. I totally get its been good for some, but it was bad time for me, though people are terrible at self evaluating stuff like this.
I know that students at my university did worse the past two years than they did the year before. And by worse I mean substantially beyond the typical variance. This is in terms of student results like course completion and grades. As well as mental health metrics such as surveys on stress etc, and in terms of the number who seek aid through uni services. But there are confounders everywhere. The way they did worse differs in character more than magnituide as well. It looks like the majority did just about normal, with what looks like a small minority doing very badly. However, this is just one uni and it will be another few years before it gets collated, anonymized further, and published. It also may not apply to real work.
Leadership overall seem to be somewhere between cautiously neutral and rather pessimistic in the organisations where I have insight which is a bad sign, as except for the ones who personally wanted to work from home, no one seems to be happy with it, including showing up in management stress level surveys. The snooping management meme does not apply. Most of us researchers had permission to work from home before we started too.
It does really boil down to if your company has a culture of documentation, reading and writing, before needing to interface with someone in real-time.
Anyone who’s contributed to open source software understands this style of “remote” working, as that’s the default.
I think for a good percentage the option might be forever except some once in a while gathering in some local bar / event place / rent a temp workspace / whatever else can substitute
Over here in France, most French companies (as opposed to US companies operating here) have to be dragged kicking and screaming into WfH arrangements.
Ever since the pandemic started picking back up steam this autumn, the government was "encouraging" companies to allow people to work from home, but there were no firm directives.
Most companies figured having their employees pile up in the metro (yay covid!) and congest the highways (yay pollution!) wasn't that big of an issue.
They also asked companies to try to stagger arrival / departure times to reduce the number of people in the metro. Didn't work any better.
In my opinion, if OP is living in France (or willing to relocate here), it should be extremely easy to find in-office jobs.
This may be true, but the issue I usually have is that they seem to not do anything about it. Not "rocking the boat" and "yessir" are quite common approaches here, to the point that a lot of people are under very high amounts of stress.
Disclaimer: I've never worked outside of France, so I don't know how people here actually compare to other places.
Don’t hold your breath.
I know this is the popular sentiment pushed by remote work fans, but in offline contexts I hear the polar opposite: Productivity struggles are ubiquitous during COVID WFH.
Even the most pro-remote people are quick to admit that COVID WFH is not like normal WFH. Some places even had school closures which meant parents were juggling kids schooling and their jobs. Maybe you worked in a company that didn’t have a lot of employees with these problems, but it has been a significant challenge for many people and companies in the past year and a half.
I managed remote teams long before COVID and even I wouldn’t ever suggest that remote has no effect on productivity. Remote is hard and I’d even say that most people aren’t cut out for it, at least not without significant mentoring and additional management attention.
Certain phases of work and types of teams do alright remotely - typically a team with a lot of senior engineers in mid-project flow with few external dependencies. But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working.
Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communication - the simple ability to lean over and check or ask how someone is doing. Not to mention the inability of learners to just pick up information through incidental conversation and overhearing other people talking.
A friend in the construction industry has been dealing with this since COVID WFH started. He works with a lot of different architects, designers, suppliers, and so on that have to coordinate work. He also has to track the costs of mistakes and extra time lost due to drawing issues, errors, missed change orders and so on.
As soon as COVID WFH started, the rate of errors spiked upward. It didn’t decline until companies brought their employees back into the office. He now goes out of his way to work with companies that have gone back to in-office work because it’s the simplest and most predictable way to reduce the amount of money he loses to simple errors.
So, like every corporation.
Juniors need seniors more than they need docs.
It’s very possible to just shoot the juniors a DM asking how they’re doing. or having an active team channel where people can ask for help or offer direction.
The screen context switching is a killer.
over chat i have the opportunity to take a minute to wrap up what i’m doing. I also walk away with a written record, so if ive asked for help, i have reference to go back to. which can then serve as a starting point for documentation. or others in the chat can read and passively absorb information. or contribute to the conversation.
I'm kind of wondering are half of these comments from an alternate universe. Most tech companies either are planning to reopen their offices or have already reopened their offices. There are a few companies going remote-only, which I suppose is nice if you like that sort of thing (I would quit immediately) but most companies do plan to go back to the office, albeit likely with more flexibility and some permanent-remote employees.
I solved this by joining a co-working hub that offers offices to remote workers / entrepreneurs. My employer pays for the hub membership.
I drive to our offices around once a month, but rest of the time I sit in a room with an accountant and gym owner. They are fun to chat and go to lunch with but they don't interrupt me with work related things.
As a bonus I get to meet and hang with professionals in many different areas and I find that really satisfying.
If I change company I work for, I just get the new employer to pay for the office. If I need to move, I prefer cities that have this kind of co-working place.
This is quite doable, here in Finland at least and while it has some downsides, it has worked for me!
I don't know why this is like this, but it is true for me.
Sounds very inefficient to me but I guess people like us are a minority.
Gladly in my country we have 0 case (Hong Kong) so we work at the office now, thank God.
Being in co-working space/office gives you some social interaction, less chance teenage neighbor is blasting latest trance tunes on really loud speakers on one side and another neighbor is tearing down/renovating his apartment with loads of jack-hammer action, perhaps you just don't have enough desk space at home, maybe it's easier to switch between work and personal life by having some (short) commute ...etc. Some of those might be all the time - and some might be every now and then.
Meanwhile not being in same "central" office with colleagues give you more independence/autonomy. Beyond having less interruptions (e.g: it's easier to avoid/ignore a chat/email than a physical shoulder poke), some people prefer (or actually perform better) when interactions are less "real time" and more async, or perhaps they just concentrate better at 4am or 10pm ...etc.
And in general idea is that co-working offices don't need to be as big/crowded nor as far as big company offices.
Though I'm not sure how much last part applies to places like Hong Kong (many people, relatively short distances)
Yet the [zero covid] approach has largely cut off Hong Kong from both China and the world - a severe blow for a place that built its success on global connections. Even more than recent political changes, the authorities' refusal to adapt to living with the virus is eroding Hong Kong's viability as an international city, according to almost two dozen diplomats, chambers of commerce, recruiters, pilots and other expatriates. ....
In a survey released this month, the British Chamber of Commerce found that 70 percent of respondents hoping to add staff in Hong Kong had encountered difficulties, with many citing quarantine restrictions. ....
Jan Willem Moller, chairman of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, said that about a quarter of Dutch businesspeople have left this year, and that the departures would "increase significantly" if the quarantine rules stay in place ....
At least 240 Cathay pilots have quit since May, according to employees who reviewed internal numbers. The carrier is reeling, with staff morale at "rock bottom" after hefty pay cuts last year and more departures imminent, several pilots said ....
Resentment spilled over last month when more than 120 students were ordered to a government quarantine camp known as Penny's Bay after they were deemed to be contacts of a pilot who was among three who tested positive on return from Germany
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hong-kong-clinging-zero-covid-132...
Through most of things China itself had a zero covid approach too.
That sounds odd. Pity is usually expressed when you're in an unfortunate position you had/have no control over. Most people (should) understand that most people work from home not out of force, but out of choice.
I do remember when enforced work-from-home started almost two years ago, a lot of people didn't have a ready-made space like a home office and complained about exactly that problem.
Coworkers spaces are basically micro remote offices for 1. Much of the remote discourse has been about avoiding offices and commutes altogether, not replacing it with a different micro office that you commute to alone.
It’s reasonable to assume that remote and work from home are the same thing unless someone explicitly says they’re working in a satellite coworking soave.
1. "99% of remote workers are working from home" - we're in the middle of a massive pandemic so it's hard not to.
2. "(...) avoiding offices and commutes altogether, not replacing it with a different micro office (...)" - if you happen to cowork, there is a massive difference between being able to choose the location of your office (or whatever we'd like to call the place where the work happens) vs being dictated one by your employer. You're in charge of your physical location and you have the freedom to optimise your commute and context that works best for you. Cutting your commute by 1 hour a day and assuming that you do 260, 8 hour working days a year yields over a month of work freed up (~32 full-time working days).
3. "It’s reasonable to assume that remote and work from home are the same thing" - I think that this way of thinking is not only grossly inaccurate but will also hurt remote work trends in the future. WFH and remote work are two sets that sometimes intersect but are not equal. They're not the same thing. To clarify that, a couple examples:
- Most of my family are artists (painters) working from home. They're not working remotely because there is no remote entity that they are answering to. They have their art studios where they live. It's WFH, not remote.
- Let's say I have a client, employer or any entity that I answer to that's in a different location. I have a contractual agreement which states I don't need to appear in their place of work and everything happens over the internet. I choose to work from an office that I have rented. I am working remotely but not working from where I sleep. It's remote without the WFH.
- I got stuck at home working remotely for my employer because we're in a nasty lockdown or I simply chose to do so. In this case, those sets intersect. It's WFH and Remote.
While I like the idea of shared co-working, the reality is that my current job works best in a room on my own. And it doesn't even involve more than 10 % meetings plus some ad-hoc calls with coworkers.
If it is a customer meeting, then I go to a phone booth that has a standing desk, and for longer ones I book a meeting room where the setup is little bit better.
In previous co-working space was this big hall and distance between tables was something like 5 to 10 meters (15-30 ft.) and almost everyone made their calls on their desks, even though phone booths and meeting rooms were available.
One's mileage may of course greatly vary :)
So my thought is that in my job hunt even if I find something that's remote (likely given where I live) that I will rent myself an office space nearby where there's other humans, better Internet, and no distractions from wife, kids, dog, garden, skis, bed, living room, TV, etc.
Working around a bunch of strangers is better than being alone in my apartment all day, a bit better still if we're in similar industries, but the real thing I want is being physically present with the actual people on my team that I'm working with.
Right now I'm working from my company's local office, but my team is located elsewhere/working remote. It's definitely better than a coworking space IMO, but after one week of flying out to HQ and working with my actual team in person, even just 1-2 of them for most of the week, I realized working from my local office doesn't even come close to how much I enjoy actually being physically present with the people I work with.
A mental checklist when looking for one (not necessarily in this order)
big companies have a _lot_ of baggage.
even a 5k company, its perfectly possible to change the company in one specific way. (Even I managed it, by accident)
at a 25k company, that's hard. 50k+ almost impossible, unless you have a posse of cheerleaders.
That said, most people are choosing to continue being based at whatever office they were based pre-COVID and will return to office once the public health situation permits (some already have been choosing to come to the office, though the situation is obviously highly location-dependent and fluid).
[*] In my case to relocate to an office of my choosing, though the outcome would have been the same had I applied to permanently WFH.
I'm not. My motivation suffered. I need contact and engagement. And driving in 45 minutes to sit at a desk with nobody around didn't help. So I put in my notice and after 10 years at Google this week is my last and I'll be looking for a job where I can be more engaged again, which unfortunately also probably means compensation cut.
Even the BigCorps are stuck in a remote morass. But even worse because they're not fully committed to it.
(Source: worked in finance/trading for 10+ years before jumping ship.)
This is a wild overgeneralisation but in descending order of fun levels/friendliness of HFT teams it goes Chicago, London, Singapore, NYC.
Seems to hold across most HFTs I have met/worked at. Not sure about hedge funds or other finance roles.
Edit: Crypto HFT firms also abound but they are generally more remote-friendly than TradFi (the latter have regulators that need you to have an office and stuff).
Now the job market appears to be reversed and the in person jobs are not the best. And, after a year and a half it seems evident that I don't really like remote work as much as I thought I would.
Note: a lot of companies are advertising themselves as "100% remote while corona lasts" though.
This is the thing that gets me...Haven't people in tech figured out how exponential growth works? Covid isn't going away, ever.
Mostly, it doesn't. Pretty much all initially-apparent exponential growth in things that aren't human-created abstractions is, at best, logistic if conditions are constant, and usually is just the net of a large number of Ransome events that averages to that growth curve, but features gambler’s ruin and collapse to zero eventually, or collapse to zero due to changing external conditions before it hits gambler’s ruin.
There’s going to be a continual stream of new variants, and vaccines will always lag behind them. Reopening everything will always accelerate this.
Gathering is always going to be a mortal risk for the rest of our lives. I just wish the world would accept that and adapt rather than resign to it and downplay it.
Learning to live with Covid doesn’t mean accepting some crazy dystopian “new normal”. It means accepting the small risk of Covid and going back to 2019 living. The one where you didn’t spend all your brainpower on “slowing the spread” of other viral diseases like the flu or the common cold.
We have vaccines for Covid now. It’s time to move on.
No, two years of half the population refusing to wear a fucking mask did a number on people. “Some crazy dystopian new normal” would actually be an improvement.
If you look at hospitalisation and death figures from heavily vaccinated countries, each wave has generally been less severe even as variants get nastier and restrictions are eased (you’re not seeing March 2020 restrictions pretty much anywhere today). It remains early for omicron, but initial signs show the same pattern.
I do think that places with this kind of politico-cultural objection to vaccines (parts of the US and Eastern Europe, for instance) may struggle.
What are you even taking about? We have marvelous vaccines that knock Covid to the level of a cold or mild flu for most people in the “office worker” demographic.
Did you worry about “exponential growth” of the 2019 flu season?
Because part of saying “Covid isn’t going away ever” means “get on with your damn life”. If Covid is here forever it becomes just another minor risk in your life like driving, swimming, or catching the cold.
> We have marvelous vaccines that knock Covid to the level of a cold or mild flu for most people in the “office worker” demographic.
And now we have omicron, which is still quite infectious in spite of the vaccines. Thankfully it seems less dangerous than delta. Who knows what the next variant will bring.
> Because part of saying “Covid isn’t going away ever” means “get on with your damn life”.
Part of “getting on with your damn life” includes accepting that there’s a new endemic virus that the population has no natural immunity to, and changing behavior appropriately.
Sorry, but time marches forward — 2019 is a thing of the past.
I think you'd be overwelmed by offers.
> Is it not as bad as I think? Are there places out there for weirdos like me?
Preferring in-office work is actually very common.
Take the news headlines and internet comments with a grain of salt. Even many of the big companies that have temporary WFH are still moving back toward in-office work.
The internet comments and anecdote-filled news articles would have you believe that office work is dead and everybody loves WFH, but my actual experience with companies suggests that a lot of people are realizing they aren’t cut out for WFH or they prefer being in the office. It’s just unpopular to say as much online these days because the people who do prefer WFH are sensitive about any suggestions that it isn’t universally superior.
Frankly, looking at job listings lately I still see far more office jobs than full remote jobs. If you’re looking for a normal office job it shouldn’t be hard to find. However, if you’ve been convinced that non-remote jobs are “red flags” by some of the recent internet hyperbole, this could be clouding your search.
Maybe it's because people WFH don't care at all if you want to spend 2 hours commuting, or that you don't mind getting covid by staying 8h a day in a closed office with tons of people. But people who doesn't want WFH, not only want to be in a office, they also want the other people in the company at the office too, because otherwise "I worry I'm going to go in to the office and be the only one there".
It's not that one's superior to the other, it's that one wants to force itself on the other.
Of course I can be flexible about things like covid variant surges or natural disasters.
I think of this the way I think of full-time pair programming: nobody should be forced to do it, but it's perfectly fine to form a team where it's a key part of the culture, as long as it's made abundantly clear to new hires before they join that it will be expected of them.
If the in-office people would just go into the office together and then deal with the remote people as we are, things would be fine. But no, the in-office extroverts want to force us all into their mold.
We could easily rework this kind of statement:
> People who like working from home want to force me to spend hours on Zoom, and subject me to constant Slack interruptions, just so they never have to "see" me, or interact with me as a complete human. No thank you.
> If the remote people would just work remotely, things would be fine. But no, when a single team member is remote, everyone has to adopt their preferred ersatz remote practices.
Of course, this is silly, nobody is trying to force anyone into a work environment that they hate--why would I want my colleagues to be miserable ?
I believe we'll end up self sorting, so everyone can be happy, and to that end there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking advice on how to find your preferred work environment, whether that's in office or remote.
Personally, I’m glad that people who like WFH have increased opportunities to do it now, so long as I never have to do it again myself. Worst two years of my life.
I don’t think its evangelical as much as protective.
I for one have had to endure grueling years of working in open office environments. I’ve got pretty severe adhd and anxiety, that’s not a good place for me.
With covid, the world shifted to working how I prefer. I’m terrified it’ll go back to how it was.
So I’m sorry it’s been a rough couple years for you, but please understand that it’s been a rough lifetime for people like me.
Because office work is still the default mentality for most people, this new world that’s aligned to my needs is in constant jeopardy.
If people like being in the office, fine. I don't understand it, but that's okay. I have ADHD and have a large startle reflex - I hate open plan offices, I dislike commuting, and I get more done from home.
If the office people stop trying to force me into the office with them, we can get along. Otherwise, no. For once in my life I can work in an environment that works for me. I'm not going to let some extrovert ruin it if I can avoid it.
My team is primarily remote but I’m actually hiring an on-site person for IT.
One bonus is that a lot of these places need IT help, and you may be appreciated more. Plus, a greater diversity of backgrounds among the people you work with.
Our challenge, as I'm sure you've guessed, is finding smart, motivated people like yourself who would prefer to be in the office. We are finding that many people, even those local to our market, would prefer to WFH.