Having worked primarily remote for the last 10 years I welcome this change in general but also somewhat lament the loss of the old status quo.<p>It's great because now many others that weren't as fortunate as me are now able to experience something I have had for a long time, many of my friends and family are enjoying new freedoms and greater amounts of personal time because commutes have been eliminated etc.<p>The downside (however minor) is I can't easily use this as the same proxy for "company I think I would like to work for" that I did in the past. My old formula for evaluating opportunities was to filter for places that would accept full time remote and then filter for those willing to pay full market rates and then decide from there. The latter half of that funnel is still likely to be highly effective as companies attempt to lowball people by making it out like remote is some sort of luxury but the entry to the funnel just got a whole lot bigger so I need to do a ton more filtering now.<p>I'm optimistic though, this has opened up a lot of companies I otherwise would have liked to work for but had draconian hiring policies w.r.t fully remote.
You can find the source that generated the graph here:
<a href="https://github.com/rinze/hn_remote/blob/main/hn_remote_main.R" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rinze/hn_remote/blob/main/hn_remote_main....</a><p>I didn't go through the raw dataset (which is generated by this query, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring</a>) but two obvious issues with the count are, it didn't filter out duplicates and it's just grep'ing the post for the word remote. So for example, "remote work not allowed," counts as a posting for remote work.<p>I have no doubt the demand for remote work is up but I am not sure this count accurately measures by how much, even for just hacker news postings.
Remote options are increasing, but I bet so is the use of "remote" as a promotional tool in job ads, where technically it's on the books but so infeasible as to be irrelevant when you look at how the job has to be performed (e.g. on site at clients or must be available for regular travel to city x)
I wonder how that graph will look in several years times. Will it be a bump that goes back down to near where it was? Seems doubtful. But I don't think we'll see it plateau at 80%, either. Maybe a drift back down to 50% ish?<p>At the beginning of the pandemic, I read a quote from a person that study the histories of pandemics and they said something like, "there will be two worlds, one before Covid, and one after."<p>It seemed like hyperbole then, but not anymore.
The Economist did this too:<p><i>For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28152174" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28152174</a> - Aug 2021 (438 comments)<p>The charts look much the same.
I have often worked remote, even before pandemic lockdowns, and it works fine for me, but I am a little concerned about the impact on the next generation of programmers. There are advantages to both old and especially new programmers, that neither experienced nor inexperienced programmers are fully aware of, to having a mix of experience levels in the same office area. Remote work allows for the conscious, I-need-to-know-x-so-I'll-ask-someone kind of interaction, but it's not as good at the spontaneous and unplanned learning from observing or talking to others. It's difficult to measure, but I believe it's significant.<p>I'm sure experienced programmers lose out from this as well, but my guess is that the impact is less, and in any case they're not just starting their career so the damage is less. I worry that the younger generation is kind of getting screwed by this change (as with so much else in the last couple decades).
Since the Y axis only goes to 80%, the chart appears at first to have a bigger absolute jump than it actually does. For example, it makes it harder to tell at a glance that there are about as many (percentage-wise) remote-not-ok postings now as there were remote-ok postings several years ago.<p>The actual change <i>is</i> amazing, though! It wouldn't be possible to tell from the posts themselves, but I wonder how many of these roles are actually filled with remote workers. Do you think employers in that middle 60% seriously consider remote candidates, or are they just including it to fit in? Or perhaps the move towards remote work has led to more postings overall.<p>Over time, I'm curious if we'll see statistics on tenure and engagement across remote and in-person employees. Are there similar examples from history where multiple small talent pools were (relatively suddenly) merged together into one big market?
We are going to see lots of digital nomad and work vacation services develop over the next few years as people realize that they can live a week or month in a different city working being productive the whole time. There are already co-working / co-living services but now expect people in tech living and working in the jungles of Brazil, on the beaches of Uruguay, or or within riding distance of mounting biking trails every morning in Arkansas. Places like Puerto Rico which is still reeling from the devastation of hurricane Maria 4 years ago will have an opportunity to participate in the digital nomad ecosystem. There is a co-working facility on the North - Western corner of the island with generator backup and fiber internet. Hopefully this will have a positive benefit on remote exotic places.<p>Prepare for an another work culture shift.
It's interesting to me that, according to the 80-20 rule, the number of jobs mentioning remote went from "basically none" to "basically everything".
cool to see others using this data, I've been tracking this trend and more over at <a href="https://www.hntrends.com/2021/july.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hntrends.com/2021/july.html</a>