I wouldn't mind so much working from home I think, but I'm privileged in that I'm a homeowner and have a desk in a bedroom away from the rest of the family; a lot of people don't have this. So if remote-first becomes a thing, the workers have to be able to afford and live somewhere comfortably.<p>But if I were to work for a remote-first company, I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not having office space. A quick Google indicates office space costs about $500-$650 a month per person (in Amsterdam, according to Google's summarized results from instantoffices.com), or between 150 and 450 euros / month per m². With that money, as an individual, you could also afford a spot in a co-working space if need be.<p>I think a $500 or €500 / month stipend or reward for working from home is fair; it's a decent amount of money, and I'm pretty confident it's still cheaper than renting an office - you don't just save on rent, but personnel as well, and things like support and maintenance contracts on the utilities, coffee machines, etc.
"Beyond Remote" makes me think of dystopias. I think in the future much fewer people will commute, so if it isn't remote, what will it be? I can think of several possibilities:<p>1) Living near a corporate campus, with plentiful housing nearby, perhaps company provided? How about if this is one way besides Basic Income, that people are protected from automation? Guaranteed Jobs is an alternative that is proposed to Basic Income.<p>2) Remote but you aren't really remote, because you're hooked into a VR system. Travel is in video games. This helps solve the climate problem by people flying and driving less.<p>3) Remote but you aren't really remote because your employer is watching your every move while you're on the clock. There is plenty of this happening, and everyone who loves remote work thinks this is bad.<p>4) Virtually everybody is remote so people stop calling it remote, much like people started referring to their mobile phone as simply "my phone" instead of "my cell phone" in the early 2000s.
> perhaps in your twenties you prefer to be nomadic, but in your 40s you'd like to have the stable work hours of having teammates in your timezone<p>I think regardless of your age, you probably prefer to have teammates in your timezone - or at least have the ability to communicate with them reasonably easily (when you need them).<p>Regarding nomadic vs stable, I suspect that's more of a family/relationship factor rather than an age factor. With family and kids, stability is just easier. Just having a family with kids is a special challenge, so being a traveling family is a special challenge that few people seem to do (although I admire the ones who pull it off well! their kids get such a broad and dynamic taste of life early).
Everyone is trying to understand what wfh is going to look like but I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about. Working from home is going to involve some very minor and inconsequential technical issues. WFH is really about power and control. Being able to physically control your body is a large part of that. It also severely curtails your alternative employment options. It isn't very easy to buy a home or even to break a lease which limits you to about a 120mi radius. Now compete with opportunities offered by the world. That's the problem. What's really going to keep employers up at night is the thought that their work from home employees realize that they're more like free agents than employees and there really isn't a need for middle management.
Author of the post here. Most of this is speculation obviously so I expect lots of opposing opinions - happy to discuss or answer any questions about my perspective!
Might be projecting here but I find this minutiae regarding embracing remote as a first class is just beating around the bush, people are pro/con depending on how they expect it would affect their salary.<p><a href="https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap-look-like/" rel="nofollow">https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...</a>
I think the points about challenges or switching and the likely future of heterogeneous office/remote balances are all strong.<p>Where this lost me was on this claim about salaries:<p>> I suspect the multipliers companies use to determine wage per city will even out to the efficient frontier of wage to cost of living as employees allocate themselves to the optimal locations.<p>I think this is a temporary situation until there is a critical mass of remote roles/companies. If I live in a lower COL region but looking at remote roles I'm not competing with people near me, and the employers are not competing with employers near me. I'm competing with people who can do the work I do, and the employer is competing with all other remote-capable companies. I think the only shape of this that might work is treating the target time zone as a single market. Assuming comparable skills, a worker in Boston, Atlanta, NYC, Toronto, Nassau or Bogota shouldn't have wide compensation differences.<p>It's possible that this leads to a net reduction in salary for many, as big companies "figuring out" remote might make formerly-painful offshoring more workable and attractively inexpensive.
Ok a question about all this remote work - why hasn't outsourcing generally been that great an experience for companies?<p>I've worked at a few places that have outsourced and it was not particularly productive.<p>Funny enough at one place we had some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality.<p>Why? If the outcome of the great remoting experiment here is that remote work is generally fantastic?
I think it's pretty funny that people seem to miss some central rules of the internet. The more connected something becomes the more centralized it becomes. So having more remote work will shift the best people even more to the GAFAM job opportunities and that's the main reason why they are doing this.