Some thoughts. First, I work with various companies, many of which have remote work options. These options range from a couple days/week remote, to 100% remote

Some thoughts. First, I work with various companies, many of which have remote work options. These options range from a couple days/week remote, to 100% remote. What I'm hearing from employees at the companies which have remote work implemented is they don't want to work for a company which doesn't offer remote work at the same level or better as their current employer. And the more time spent working away from the office, the more adamant the employees are about this. And these employees aren't only technologists either. I'm hearing the same thing from accounting, marketing, etc department employees who get a taste of remote work, and really don't want to go back to butts-in-seats. And their reasons are similar to the tech side--productivity goes up, no commute, fewer meetings and annoying co-workers. Second, there are very few technical reasons (I won't say none) that a company can't enable remote workers and save a ton on real estate costs. Skype, Google Hangouts, Facetime and even WebRTC (even in it's current state), show that individual/team-based video collaboration is possible over commonly available 20-50 Mb/s connections. VoIP enables an employee's "desk phone" to follow them anywhere (I was doing this with a headset/laptop/VPN in 2001). Chat is heavily used, even in the "business side" (accounting, etc) for traceability. The main technical problem is still reliable bandwidth. Even though 20-50 Mb/s suffices, 100 Mb/s or even 1 Gb/s active fiber would be better, to achieve corporate LAN-like speeds at home. Around this region, FTTP-enabled homes are selling like hotcakes. Finally, with the advent of "The Cloud" or just plain old-fashioned datacenter hosting, there's really no difference between working in a cube or working from home. Everything's already remote. In this sense, many corporate employees--with systems and co-workers located in another building/city/country--have a huge head start on this compared to start-up employees.