This is a bold claim made on a very shaky set of data. Most companies aren't going to explicitly post jobs for remote, just because a lot of talent management platforms don't really support it well. I think the goto is to post the job as available in every location the company has an office, and see what the applicant wants to do.<p>Of course employers want people to come back. They have millions if not billions of dollars in real estate liabilities that are effectively useless. As an aside, I wonder if there is some clever way to get a tax write off for office space that went unused due to a global pandemic - or writing off an office entirely as a loss.
This is like saying "There aren't enough high-paying jobs".<p>Remote is one property of a job to select for.<p>You may not value it high enough to compromise on other parameters.<p>Sure, there aren't enough remote jobs for everyone to have one.<p>But everyone doesn't want a remote job, just like everyone wants a high-paying job. (Sure, everyone wants money. But they want to work excessive hours, or work in a field they find questionable? Well, maybe high pay isn't always a good trade-off either.)
If there is a mismatch then in-person offices will need to offer higher salaries and/or lower their standards to attract in-person workers. (Or put another way, remote positions will be able to attract comparable candidates while offering lower salaries.)<p>Whether that salary difference is +10% or +90% I would expect it to show up in salary data eventually, and that might be a more accurate indication of the magnitude of the mismatch than job postings.
My company is breaking big leases and even in the formerly overcrowded HQ it feels at most half full (or maybe half empty??). I don't think most people come in 5 days a week even if they're RTO (return to office).<p>I personally think the remote work genie is out of the bottle and it's here to stay! Unless it's a very collaborative phase or (big) hardware related like automotive there will be plenty of remote jobs.
>Indeed, as reported by The Washington Post, 50% of job applications on LinkedIn last month were for remote work positions, despite the fact that from-home postings made up just 15% of the listings on the site.<p>This doesn't actually tell us anything nor did the source linked in the article clarify further.
Companies may ask, but usually people quit and productivity drops.<p>For me return to office would be 60% pay cut. Good luck finding another developer :)
Remote work for a lot of people simply does not work. It is not the interaction makes progress but the intensity of interactions makes progress. And for a large number of people remote communication does not give the necessary intensity.<p>In my opinion very few jobs should be posted as remote but adjusted to remote if that does not hurt productivity.
> Indeed, as reported by The Washington Post, 50% of job applications on LinkedIn last month were for remote work positions, despite the fact that from-home postings made up just 15% of the listings on the site.<p>Another explanation could be: High-paying tech industry jobs are more likely to offer WFH, and are more competitive than low-paying service-industry jobs. There are more service industry job postings, but more people applying for each tech job posting. Thus, 15% of postings offer WFH, but 50% of applications go to WFH positions. Though true, this is not evidence for the conclusion they're drawing.<p>Not saying this <i>is</i> the explanation, I'm saying that they're picking out one element of a job posting and drawing conclusions from it.
What a horrid analysis!<p>50% of applications were asking for remote work in one of the positions that offered remote work (15% of the total LinkedIn openings). That's a 3:1 applications to jobs ratio.<p>So what!?<p>Saying "there aren't enough remote jobs" makes the assumption of a 1:1 match ratio: 1 job opening will be filled by 1 applicant. But that's never true. Forget about the remote jobs. What's the applications to job openings ratio for the ones that do not offer remote work?