This will be true until new or aggressive companies decide to embrace or retain WFH and so take staff and particularly revenue from in-office companies. Wound the beast and the beast has to respond or die.
Of course, if this doesn’t happen then it was a covid induced dream. Personally, I think the lower overhead and wider hiring range justifies WFH but that’s me.
> lower overhead and wider hiring range justifies WFH
agreed about lower overhead. Wider hiring range - only if you view workforce as cogs who have merely transactional relationships. Teams having smaller and costlier, but in-person interaction will outcompete larger and cheaper, but fully-remote teams.
Proof? Hiring half of a professional couple is way easier remotely. More so if they have kids. software development isn’t greatly aided by location. Design, perhaps, but coding needs peace and quiet. Linux seems to proceed ok. Remote also lets companies hire around regional or weather issues.
I am married and I have kids. So are most of our friends living in this area. Almost everyone prefers an in-office or a hybrid setup. Barring one person, no one likes fully remote.
WFH works only in certain niche areas - when the work you do can be done alone on your laptop without any heavy collaboration required. I sincerely wish that the current meme of "WFH FTW" dies out before it removes one of the last ladders left for the Western masses to prosperity.
I can understand why capital class is in favor, they after all get labor for cheap and get to break the inconvenience of having to pay higher compensation. I just don't understand why labor (eg. software engineers) doesn't see the inevitable writing on the wall. But again, people also had a rose-tinted view that companies will never do layoffs and high TC will perpetuate forever. Hopefully, people are realizing now that the capital class will fuck them over at the fist chance they get.
Offshoring/outsourcing is decades old yet it didn’t kill office work pre covid. Good staff, when required, requires effort to hire. If you don’t need it, why do it?
Because the biggest differences now are: remote collaboration tools are mature, companies learn to hire-and-replace one-by-one. So existing US-based staff was used to onboard new non-US members, then once those members ramped up, they were used for further onboarding newer non-US members. Then when the layoffs happened, most of the brunt fell on US based members.
This didn't happen pre-covid where you had to replace the whole team, which was much harder to pull off. Also, tools (like Zoom) were not yet widely adopted and the populace wasn't trained on them. Covid forced us to learn all those tools.
8 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadOf course, if this doesn’t happen then it was a covid induced dream. Personally, I think the lower overhead and wider hiring range justifies WFH but that’s me.
agreed about lower overhead. Wider hiring range - only if you view workforce as cogs who have merely transactional relationships. Teams having smaller and costlier, but in-person interaction will outcompete larger and cheaper, but fully-remote teams.
Unless you think that anybody married is chum…
So no idea what your point is...
I can understand why capital class is in favor, they after all get labor for cheap and get to break the inconvenience of having to pay higher compensation. I just don't understand why labor (eg. software engineers) doesn't see the inevitable writing on the wall. But again, people also had a rose-tinted view that companies will never do layoffs and high TC will perpetuate forever. Hopefully, people are realizing now that the capital class will fuck them over at the fist chance they get.
This didn't happen pre-covid where you had to replace the whole team, which was much harder to pull off. Also, tools (like Zoom) were not yet widely adopted and the populace wasn't trained on them. Covid forced us to learn all those tools.