Companies were outsourcing 20+ years ago so I doubt the WFH binge will change things all that much. And unless there's a tax nexus in the foreign country than

Companies were outsourcing 20+ years ago so I doubt the WFH binge will change things all that much. And unless there's a tax nexus in the foreign country than the foreign workers will either be contractors or workers for a company that provides workers. Whether they're hardworking or not is up to the situation, but having cheaper workers 14 hours away by clock might be a recipe for high turnover rather than high productivity. They've torn up real offices to create the bullpens and thus save on $$ for office space. Yeah, they might reverse the process and spend more on the office environment but I would not bet that most will do this. Suck it up will be the argument that's presented and they'll claim the recession as the excuse. And as this is HN, I don't really care what office workers who aren't developers do. There are other forums for such discussion with other needs and views. Sales, marketing, all of these kinds of things aren't pertinent to my discussion. And as far as communication goes, all of my coworkers share slack and email connections. Thus, a portion or the entire company can be easily reached with a single post/message. I suspect most tech companies are similar. Re: sunk cost, the fact that the company owns or has a long-term lease on a property isn't relevant to how they treat their employees. Or shouldn't be. If you prefer office work, go for it, but many don't especially in the current office conditions. And yeah, I feel that there's a socialization component in bullpen offices that might be useful but it's not work. I've programmed a very long time and the act of software development (aside from initial design) is totally opposite from socialization. If you want to hire the best workers, and many companies claim this, then you either accept WFH or you're really looking to hire the best workers who will rip up their home environment and move to take the new position. Piece of cake for somebody single, rather annoying for those who are not. It's not like there's lots of pink-collar jobs that could accommodate partners... And if the people at the other end of the zoom aren't important enough to bring in to brainstorm, then nobody will listen to them F2F.