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I believe remote work has two futures. The first is many companies will return to requiring a majority of time in the office. There are admittedly hard to meas

I believe remote work has two futures. The first is many companies will return to requiring a majority of time in the office. There are admittedly hard to measure reasons management will want back in the office, and the first is productivity (I don’t mean how much an IC produces, but how much revenue per employee a firm generates). The second future is all our tech jobs get offshored, similar to what happened after the dotcom bubble burst. I believe that companies will probably wind up going to future #1. Or at least companies that are heavily invested in R&D. There will probably be more satellite offices and more geographically distributed tech startups. But in the first future I believe SF and Silicon Valley will still serve as one of the largest tech employment hubs. For example NYC is still a major financial hub, despite major top-25 US banks being headquartered in places like Texas, Virginia and North Carolina. Edited to comply with Dang’s reminder of site guidelines.

rootusrootus 5y ago
> I believe that companies will probably wind up going to future #1 I agree. There is some temporary leverage tech employees have right now, but as it fades, the inexorable pressure will be to return to the office a significant amount of the time. Middle managers at many companies exist primarily to build kingdoms, and they like to see their subjects.
- weatherlite 5y ago
  Hmm really not agreeing here. It's gonna be a huge deal breaker for many talented devs. 1-2 days a week in office sure, but more than that? You will lose a lot of people for very little gains.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Sure, right now, I think you're right. But I don't think the leverage will last. And I expect there to be a bifurcation between what you can earn remotely and what you can get if you're willing to come into the office, and that will bring a number of people back into the office as well. I think we will see a permanent increase in remote work, but I don't think the level we see now will persist for more than a couple years.
    - weatherlite 5y ago
      Why not? What was so great about the old way of doing things? I can't really see the advantages. Hybrid + fully remote sounds much more sensible to me but maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Consider that each year that passes we get more used to the new way; even middle management who have incentive for things to go back to the way there were - even they are probably starting to appreciate no commute and not having to work in crowded open space every day. Now a fully remote company is something else, that's probably hard to do. But hybrid together with a certain percentage of fully remote workers makes a lot of sense to me.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        I've worked at a company for a while who has had hybrid onsite/remote teams for many years. If you're remote, you accept the career limitation. The people who want more money, more promotions, more everything -- they show up at the office. It's pretty easy to forget about the remote folks when in-office discussions and decisions are made. It's not great, but it's just a simple reality that plays out no matter how hard people try to work around it. This is why I won't work remotely for a company that does hybrid teams. I will only work on a team that is fully remote, or one that is local enough to me that I'm part of the in-office crowd.
        weatherlite 5y ago
        Could be, everyone makes their own calculations.
ryandvm 5y ago
I have worked at a number of places that relied heavily on off-shoring and my observation every single time was that while individual developer costs are generally much lower, you incur a lot of other hidden costs due to things like language barriers and asynchronous communication cycles. But the biggest factor preventing a mass transition to off-shoring is that off-shore devs are always contractors since very few orgs can handle the logistics of international employment. As someone that did contract work for 5 years, contractors do not engage the same way that employees do. We are generally immune from the client's political bullshit and if things get too messy we are much more likely to waltz to another contract rather than help fix your org's fundamental problems.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  I'm contracting for a startup right now, and find myself much more engaged than when I was working full-time on salary for a mid-sized (~1000-2000 employees) company. I had a really hard time being motivated for the mid-sized company, because it felt like there was very little impact to my work, and a lot of time was spent bikeshedding and yak shaving, the work I did do was not very interesting, I wasn't being challenged, and I wasn't learning new things. I was basically a glorified button-pushing monkey. In my last year working there I started tracking my time for my personal analysis, and found that I was doing ~15 hours per week of work (which included >5 hours of meetings, some of which were large conference calls which I would fall asleep during). I ended up quitting to take 6 months off work. When I started contracting for a startup (working on interesting things), I found I have much more ownership over the tools I work on (I've sort of become 'in charge' of several applications that I'm the only developer on), and I'm billing per hour also. I still struggle to get more than 30 hours per week, but I've probably turn out more code in a month here than in the last year at the last place.
  - dntrkv 5y ago
    The differentiating factor in your case is startup vs mid-size company. Not contracting vs FTE.
- cornel_io 5y ago
dang 5y ago
> I’m going to get downvoted to hell Please don't do this in HN comments. It adds noise, breaks the penultimate guideline (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and is uncorrelated with reality.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
> The first is many companies will return to requiring a majority of time in the office. I think it will be the major choice for many companies for one simple reason, they've paid for the office. Either via rent or by building it. An office also normally has a vibe, a community spirit, etc. That has disappeared with remote work. People complain they miss it yet still don't realise the only way it's coming back is if everyone has to go to the office. I think the hybrid way will be popular for a year or two then companies will go back to demanding that people are in the office. Especially large corporations.
- merrywhether 5y ago
  I was remote before the pandemic, and I really enjoyed that my company had an office and vibe, as you say. I went there almost monthly and internalized the culture myself. I think a lot of people actually want to work from an office (if it is a nice one), and the mix of base office culture with remote workers visiting regularly works really well IMO and I’d love to return to it. Part of the reason so many people wanted to go remote was that a lot of offices sucked (in addition to commutes, etc). It’s be great if we got better offices for those who wanted them and more flexible remote for others (but that’s probably too optimistic).
CoastalCoder 5y ago
> The second future is all our tech jobs get offshored, similar to what happened after the dotcom bubble burst. I think a few factors might moderate this outcome: 1) Timezone-spreads matter. The 4-hour span of West Coast to East Coast time zones isn't ideal, but manageable. Beyond that, realtime collaboration becomes a serious challenge. 2) Maybe (I hope) remote-work enablers like dedicated workspaces and interactive whiteboards will get more widely adopted. These could make a "middle ground" between those to extremes more competitive.
- weatherlite 5y ago
  I think countries in general wouldn't want to outsource huge chunks of their IT/tech positions, that's not really good. 20-30% is manageable, but more than that is strategically very dangerous for the economic competitiveness of the country. I expect governments to start putting caps on this (by taxation or whatever) at some point to restrict it.

rootusrootus 5y ago

> I believe that companies will probably wind up going to future #1 I agree. There is some temporary leverage tech employees have right now, but as it fades, the inexorable pressure will be to return to the office a significant amount of the time. Middle managers at many companies exist primarily to build kingdoms, and they like to see their subjects.

weatherlite 5y ago
Hmm really not agreeing here. It's gonna be a huge deal breaker for many talented devs. 1-2 days a week in office sure, but more than that? You will lose a lot of people for very little gains.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Sure, right now, I think you're right. But I don't think the leverage will last. And I expect there to be a bifurcation between what you can earn remotely and what you can get if you're willing to come into the office, and that will bring a number of people back into the office as well. I think we will see a permanent increase in remote work, but I don't think the level we see now will persist for more than a couple years.
  - weatherlite 5y ago
    Why not? What was so great about the old way of doing things? I can't really see the advantages. Hybrid + fully remote sounds much more sensible to me but maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Consider that each year that passes we get more used to the new way; even middle management who have incentive for things to go back to the way there were - even they are probably starting to appreciate no commute and not having to work in crowded open space every day. Now a fully remote company is something else, that's probably hard to do. But hybrid together with a certain percentage of fully remote workers makes a lot of sense to me.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I've worked at a company for a while who has had hybrid onsite/remote teams for many years. If you're remote, you accept the career limitation. The people who want more money, more promotions, more everything -- they show up at the office. It's pretty easy to forget about the remote folks when in-office discussions and decisions are made. It's not great, but it's just a simple reality that plays out no matter how hard people try to work around it. This is why I won't work remotely for a company that does hybrid teams. I will only work on a team that is fully remote, or one that is local enough to me that I'm part of the in-office crowd.
      - weatherlite 5y ago
        Could be, everyone makes their own calculations.

ryandvm 5y ago

I have worked at a number of places that relied heavily on off-shoring and my observation every single time was that while individual developer costs are generally much lower, you incur a lot of other hidden costs due to things like language barriers and asynchronous communication cycles. But the biggest factor preventing a mass transition to off-shoring is that off-shore devs are always contractors since very few orgs can handle the logistics of international employment. As someone that did contract work for 5 years, contractors do not engage the same way that employees do. We are generally immune from the client's political bullshit and if things get too messy we are much more likely to waltz to another contract rather than help fix your org's fundamental problems.

pcthrowaway 5y ago
I'm contracting for a startup right now, and find myself much more engaged than when I was working full-time on salary for a mid-sized (~1000-2000 employees) company. I had a really hard time being motivated for the mid-sized company, because it felt like there was very little impact to my work, and a lot of time was spent bikeshedding and yak shaving, the work I did do was not very interesting, I wasn't being challenged, and I wasn't learning new things. I was basically a glorified button-pushing monkey. In my last year working there I started tracking my time for my personal analysis, and found that I was doing ~15 hours per week of work (which included >5 hours of meetings, some of which were large conference calls which I would fall asleep during). I ended up quitting to take 6 months off work. When I started contracting for a startup (working on interesting things), I found I have much more ownership over the tools I work on (I've sort of become 'in charge' of several applications that I'm the only developer on), and I'm billing per hour also. I still struggle to get more than 30 hours per week, but I've probably turn out more code in a month here than in the last year at the last place.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  The differentiating factor in your case is startup vs mid-size company. Not contracting vs FTE.
cornel_io 5y ago

dang 5y ago

> I’m going to get downvoted to hell Please don't do this in HN comments. It adds noise, breaks the penultimate guideline (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and is uncorrelated with reality.

that_guy_iain 5y ago

> The first is many companies will return to requiring a majority of time in the office. I think it will be the major choice for many companies for one simple reason, they've paid for the office. Either via rent or by building it. An office also normally has a vibe, a community spirit, etc. That has disappeared with remote work. People complain they miss it yet still don't realise the only way it's coming back is if everyone has to go to the office. I think the hybrid way will be popular for a year or two then companies will go back to demanding that people are in the office. Especially large corporations.

merrywhether 5y ago
I was remote before the pandemic, and I really enjoyed that my company had an office and vibe, as you say. I went there almost monthly and internalized the culture myself. I think a lot of people actually want to work from an office (if it is a nice one), and the mix of base office culture with remote workers visiting regularly works really well IMO and I’d love to return to it. Part of the reason so many people wanted to go remote was that a lot of offices sucked (in addition to commutes, etc). It’s be great if we got better offices for those who wanted them and more flexible remote for others (but that’s probably too optimistic).

CoastalCoder 5y ago

> The second future is all our tech jobs get offshored, similar to what happened after the dotcom bubble burst. I think a few factors might moderate this outcome: 1) Timezone-spreads matter. The 4-hour span of West Coast to East Coast time zones isn't ideal, but manageable. Beyond that, realtime collaboration becomes a serious challenge. 2) Maybe (I hope) remote-work enablers like dedicated workspaces and interactive whiteboards will get more widely adopted. These could make a "middle ground" between those to extremes more competitive.

weatherlite 5y ago
I think countries in general wouldn't want to outsource huge chunks of their IT/tech positions, that's not really good. 20-30% is manageable, but more than that is strategically very dangerous for the economic competitiveness of the country. I expect governments to start putting caps on this (by taxation or whatever) at some point to restrict it.