The whole pushback against remote work is absolutely nuts. When the companies were staring at shutdowns and loss of revenue, everyone gladly accepted the idea that people can work from home. And contrary to the popular belief, productivity increased (our own CEO admitted at one point in an all hands). But the minute there was a sign things are opening up, there's a complete opposite viewpoint being pushed from the same people.
I think there's a lot of different things going on here:
1. Control freaks are losing their minds in the Pandemic and they want some of the control back.
2. Extroverts are losing it and want things to be social again.
3. People who have bullshit jobs and absolutely don't add any value except look busy on "make work" are having a hard time justify their need in the company.
4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Just want to provide a counter-story to your anecdote. Many of my colleagues are excited to go back to the office to increase collaboration and work satisfaction. Personally, wfh is really difficult for me and I can't wait to get back in the office. Working from home feels like grinding away at an endless list of tasks and waiting for the day to be over. Working at an office feels like playing a sport with a team - every day is significantly more enjoyable and satisfying.
Granted: I am a young, single person working in design/product and my job requires a ton of collaboration. I don't really consider myself an extrovert FWIW
Personally I think being junior is so so difficult to do remotely. It must be insanely hard to get things done and have the confidence to organise people who are more senior than you to have those random conversations and exploration meetings that make a product worthwhile (and that you can learn from). It is possible but you need to manufacture the spontaneity if you see what I mean. Most of the people who love WFH seem to be very advanced in their careers.
I've been effectively remote (albeit with a lot of work travel) for a number of years now and won't ever return to an office. That said, and appreciating that it's a different world from a few decades ago in terms of comms and so forth, it feels to me that coming out of school and shortly thereafter and being in this situation would have been extremely difficult.
The problem with fully remote work is that once you accept that a job can be done from anywhere, you have to compete on a global level. It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people willing to work for less than you! So don't get too excited about it ;-)
One of the reasons I went with a 99% remote job. I'm an hour from the office. There's nothing I can't do from home a vast majority of the time, but the proximity to the office means that when there is value in me showing up, I can, on very short notice. They definitely paid me more for that ability, even though they were fine with me only planning on coming in maybe once a quarter. And I like that I'll still be getting some face time.
Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.
People have been making this threat for decades now but here is the thing: you always get what you pay for.
High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.
The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.
You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.
> It can be done from India, China, Pakistan, or any other place where they have smart people
Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?
Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?
It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.
I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of effort involved in getting something done by someone locally to someone remote.
Time zone is the first hurdle. Although, in my opinion, this can still be overcome in a relative short period of time.
The second hurdle is familiarity with work culture and style. For a person who's worked already in your office, knows the system, knows all the procedures, knows the nooks an crannies of how all the softwares behave, who to call in case of issues, how to resolve them. All these aspects add to a significant amount of non-quantifiable knowledge which lots of organizations don't consider while outsourcing initially.
The third is process. Most organizations have their processes worked out over time. And this is rarely, if ever, documented. Even for people coming to office, there's a certain amount of time till they get familiar with this.
However, the biggest challenge is communication. This means everything - grammar, vocabulary, diction, accent, familiarity with jargon, parts of speech, colloquialisms, everything. To make a requirement understood itself is a challenge. Asking questions about that requirement when faced with a roadblock, is again a bottleneck.
As an Indian, who's worked in most of the English speaking countries, and now working from India, I can just humbly say this - never outsource to cut costs. This will bite you hard in the short run. Only if you have processes set, softwares used correctly, procedures documented, should you look into outsourcing. And that too it should be for reasons other than purely financial. As an example, having remote workers across time zones helps in maintaining support for your global customers better. Similarly, time zone differences can be used to your advantage. Finally, interacting with different cultures can only improve your organization's awareness, maturity, communication and global reach.
Since my dad ran a software company, I've been hearing these worries about jobs moving to India etc... for most of my life. I worried about it 20 years ago, worried about it 15 years ago, and I don't worry about it anymore. As other commenters have said, not only has the pay gap for skilled engineers diminished significantly over that time, but there are other significant barriers to offshoring.
But that's always been true. And companies are going to do that if they can, regardless if we WfH or WfW. More than a few of us have seen the mass firings, and training some barely-comprehensible foreign workers, whom wreck the place, and then the company calls and begs us to come back.
That's literally the same argument about the "Fight for $15" - the argument is 'yer gonna get automated'. That's going to happen no matter what.
There are still barriers to truly global labour - time zones, language barriers, complicated tax systems etc. I'm in New Zealand where there's little overlap in working hour time zones with most major markets.
This is why it's good to be a lawyer. It's one of the last remaining guilds of knowledge workers with any power. It's literally illegal to have someone from wherever do certain tasks if they are not properly licensed.
In the immediate term, instead of competing with people in a 60 square mile radius, you have to compete against the rest of the country. That’s great if you are really good at what you do. If you aren’t, it isn’t.
Also remote workers are easier to automate because employers know precisely what they are doing.
Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace.
At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.
No they won't. The very reason of the management chain is manage people, in arm distance, not remotely. The execs understand this best kept secret better than anyone else.
> 4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
I don't think this is fair characterisation. If you have kids, working from home can be quite stressful.
> And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Generally almost no one gives a shit if you work from home or not. The only one caring about that is your employer, and you should negotiate with your employer about that. No need to complain about everyone and everything if you can't find an employer willing to let you work remote.
On point 4, I think this is where co-working spaces have a moment to shine. A fully remote environment that you still get to leave the house to go to and no impact on how the rest of the team live their lives.
College was by far the best time in my life because of the environment of campus, even with the pitiful dorm room sizing and sub-average dining options. If I could move to a campus - perhaps that was focused on people in their thirties - where people from many companies would go to work remotely and live, that would be an absolute game-changer for me.
I think it really comes down to urban planning and the burden of most people's commutes. Worth noting that from my experience the interpersonal negativity index of my previous work environments is highly correlated with longer commute times and larger city size.
If I were running a large company I would create many small satellite offices around the metro area that employees could sign up to work from. Might even be worth purchasing a few large RVs and renting space and power hookups in good locations while figuring out employee preferences.
Worker productivity is not measured in GDP. It is a component of it, but asset and resource prices also factor into the equation. Nobody is going to suggest taxi drivers can go fully remote and work from home, yet that still feeds into GDP.
One worker complained that the manager “wanted butts in seats because we couldn’t be trusted to [work from home] even though we’d been doing it since last March,” adding: “I’m giving my notice on Monday.”
I've seen this with my current employer. Their message has been that going forward at some point, "Working remotely is not an option."
There's really no reason I can't work from home. I've been doing it since March 2020. I don't have any customer-facing responsibilities; I administer servers and write code. The only thing that requires my physical presence is the occasional need to install or replace hardware.
It was one thing to not support remote work in 2019 when it was an unknown. In 2021, we've proven it can work; workers know it, and employers should know it. There's no un-ringing that bell.
I'm older, and have no desire to return to the startup lifestyle again but there's no doubt I can find remote work. As I see it, the choice is mine, and taking a mini-retirement and looking for new opportunities if my employer wants to be inflexible is not exacly unappealing.
I've been doing remote contract work since I became a digital nomad in 2018. Before the pandemic it was absolutely a minority of companies that were comfortable with the concept. A lot of them from the Basecamp school of thinking.
Since the pandemic kicked off, this has changed. Despite the fact that there are many employers out there trying to force everybody back into the office, there is also a large pool of companies that have realised the wheels didn't fall off during the pandemic.
I've been speaking to a lot of current and ex-colleagues in the tech industry. Both on the management and on the employee side. Even the managers are increasing looking at where they're going to work from long term. Realising that they really can move to cheaper cities (in Europe), possibly with better weather, and keep working just the same.
I think there will be a bit of tension this year, but I can't see it just going back to the way it was previously. So many of the previous objections are just obviously false now. In a lot of cases I've seen teams become more productive (not to mention happier), because they're not sitting in an office.
I've seen the faces of most of their kids and pets now, and it turns out that's pretty cool as well.
All great points. It is similar for me. Server/App admin plus some coding. Most meetings happen over webex because teams are distributed across cities in different time zones. But working from home is not an option. Also actually flying to different offices to collaborate face-to-face is not an option either because "Hehe who flies mere devs for meetings, isn't there a slack / zoom / webex?"
If you know how to code and admin boxes, you have your pick of jobs. There’s no reason to ever go back to an office if you don’t want to unless you’re on some terrible immigration twist-your-arm situation where you get deported if you get fired from that particular job.
I've had this argument pre-covid too. WFH has some trade offs but it works fine at scale. I worked at a place that was occasionally hostile to WFH (depended on the team) even when we had teams split across offices around the world. Like why would I need to sit at a desk in New York to talk to people over video in Chicago and London?
I'm firmly in camp "office time sounds wonderful" because I live alone, and as it turns out, not having any humans nearby is downright depressing. I'm also somewhat introverted (weird, right?) and while I was living with other people, I desired quite the opposite; staying at home was much less distracting than being in the chaos of a shared space most days.
So which do I prefer? Ehh, it depends. I'm not planning to live alone forever, it's just where I'm at right now. I'd imagine others are in a similar boat; we're different, and not necessarily constant either. So, as much as I encourage opening the offices back up and will take part in that space if given the chance, I wouldn't force that on anyone. I think the responsible thing to do is to measure performance rather than seat-in-chair, and so long as everyone's pulling their weight, let each employee make their own informed decision. It's their health on the line, after all, and healthy employees do better work.
Sounds like... you want some office time and probably some "non-office" work time, and that you'd want that to be at least partially under your control (both now and long term). And you probably recognize the benefits in having people have a (large) degree of autonomy in how they do their work. There are some things which are better done face to face, in person, and some things where... working solo (in surroundings of your choice) can allow one to be more productive.
IMO, there's no one "right" answer on this issue beyond "more autonomy", and I suspect we'll see more contractors/freelancers in Coworking spaces and more WFH arrangements to accommodate that, even if it's not touted publicly much.
It's somehow fine to have a group of people you've never met work in India, and they can get their work done OK, but you can't do the same thing from 15 miles away from your main office? Just insane.
I'm an introvert and WFH all the time has made me borderline crazy, but it is sure nice not to have to drive to an office 30-minutes away when most days I could just starting working.
While I think a hybrid situation is perfectly fine, there are also a bunch of solutions to this that don't require a permanent office. For example, co-working can facilitate some of the desired interaction while at the same time putting the power in your hands.
We were told for years, there is no flex time, don't even think about it. While the higher ups obviously flexed whenever they wanted to. Suddenly covid hits and I'm scrambling to get everyone setup so they can work remote. We go a whole year working remote with almost no issues or lost productivity. And now we're back in the office and the mood has definitely changed.
> We go a whole year working remote with almost no issues or lost productivity
I've heard a lot about this claim "no lost productivity". However that is for the employer to be evaluated, not for the employees. The complaining employees lose credibility when they make claims like that in complex fields, because productivity is very complex metric to be measured in many jobs.
Unless you're talking about something that can be objectively measured--widget output from an assembly line, average times to retrieve/place something in a warehouse, and so on--the "complexity" you note is just fertile ground for gaming. It's downright trivial for an employer to massage "productivity" numbers in a way that supports their agenda.
This is what's interesting about the 'remote work doesn't work' group. My first bigCo programming job in the late 90s was at a satellite office with another single developer. We built a lot of software with developers from other satellite offices using only email and phone calls. /shrug
If I went into my office every day--which I haven't had a desk in for a while--I'd spend a decent chunk of time every week on calls with people across 2 continents, multiple offices, and fully remote.
That depends upon your communication patterns & architecture. If your outsourced/offshored workers are tightly knit into your development team, then they're basically the same as WFH workers.
But if they are discrete teams, working on discrete services, then the issues tend to be around management, collaboration & communication patterns (both human and technical). Those are the areas which many companies can't handle or don't have correct to enable useful outsourcing.
The flip side is that if remote work is absolutely the same, then offshoring and outsourcing are also.
Why have your employees work remotely in a city 100 miles from their original office at 80-90% of the cost when you can have them be 1000 miles from the office at 30-40% of the cost.
If you find employees in Central and South America they would also be in the same timezone.
Offshoring and outsourcing can be a nightmare. It doesn't have to be though. I've seen at least one example that works very well.
Of course it was less about cost and more about the ability to quickly provide additional resources, and it was done with the upmost care to make it still feel like one team, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare.
As a software engineer, I will never, ever work from an office again. There are zero reasons to.
And this isn't even related to Covid, I've been working remotely for 6 years.
Everything I do is carefully tracked. Every line of code is logged and timestamped. All my assigned tasks are viewable by anyone, with every associated line of code one click away. When I am connected to the VPN to access work resources, everything is carefully logged.
If we need to do a meeting, we use Microsoft Teams. You can chat with me whenever you want, and can schedule a video call whenever you need to.
At least with my job, a senior software engineer, there is zero need for an office.
I realize not everyone is in my position, and there are plenty of jobs that do require you to go into a physical office space. This career is not one of them.
Is it possible that this pushback against working from home might (at least in part) be motivated by a desire of keeping real-estate prices up? After all, if offices aren't needed anymore, prices would probably plummet, and real estate is a very popular asset among a certain group of people.
And housing prices as well, if people weren't tied to geography by a commute they can work from wherever they like and a lot of them would move somewhere a lot cheaper.
The pros and cons of remote work have posted many times here. Just like most things, it is going to come down to market forces determining whether remote work will stick.
If employers discover that they can pay less (in real estate and salary!) if they offer remote work as an option, while keeping the efficiency of an office worker, then the companies that do this will have a competitive edge. If companies discover that having employees in the office is a competitive advantage, then I don't care how harshly HN lambasts office work, it will make a comeback.
I expect the result will be somewhere in the middle. Certainly different jobs and industries are going to be affected differently. As HN is mostly computer jockeys, I have no doubt that remote work will be more common to the people here.
Readit News
I think there's a lot of different things going on here: 1. Control freaks are losing their minds in the Pandemic and they want some of the control back. 2. Extroverts are losing it and want things to be social again. 3. People who have bullshit jobs and absolutely don't add any value except look busy on "make work" are having a hard time justify their need in the company. 4. People who absolutely cant stand their families want to spend time away from them.
And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Granted: I am a young, single person working in design/product and my job requires a ton of collaboration. I don't really consider myself an extrovert FWIW
Relatedly, after my previous job tried to force everyone back in the office a majority of the time, and I gave them my notice after accepting an offer a week later, my former boss was suddenly very willing to discuss working from home 3 days a week if it meant I stayed. They can do it, they know remote work has been fine for a year+, they just don't want to. If you're an employer, make your peace with a hybrid or remote environment and make the accommodations clear now, not after all your people have started interviewing places that will. No matter what you're paying your tech folks, someone else will pay them more right now, and then it'll be too late.
High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.
The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.
You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.
Software engineers in these countries are significantly less competent than their American counterparts. This has been documented by academic literature.[1] That still doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers in Pakistan, but what makes you think you have the ability to recruit, interview, hire and retain the top decile of engineer in Pakistan?
Are you able to discriminate between a great Pakistani engineer's resume looks compared to an average one? Do you have a network of contacts in Pakistan to make recommendations? Will you be able to speak Urdu when you check their references? Does your company have any reputation or prestige in Pakistan? Why would a highly in-demand Pakistani engineer be interested in working for a company without any career progression, who's only outsourcing work because it's cheap?
It's not like this is the first time in history that companies have realized they can offshore programmers to low-cost markets. It's literally been a constant theme in IT management circles for fifty years. It's not like they needed WFH to make it happen. It really doesn't cost much to open an office in Bangalore. Cassandras have been predicting the collapse of the American software market for decades, yet engineer compensation just keeps growing. If anything the economics are far less compelling than they were 20 years ago, since the wage differential is much smaller. If offshoring didn't work in 1995, there's no reason to expect it to work in 2021.
[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732
Time zone is the first hurdle. Although, in my opinion, this can still be overcome in a relative short period of time.
The second hurdle is familiarity with work culture and style. For a person who's worked already in your office, knows the system, knows all the procedures, knows the nooks an crannies of how all the softwares behave, who to call in case of issues, how to resolve them. All these aspects add to a significant amount of non-quantifiable knowledge which lots of organizations don't consider while outsourcing initially.
The third is process. Most organizations have their processes worked out over time. And this is rarely, if ever, documented. Even for people coming to office, there's a certain amount of time till they get familiar with this.
However, the biggest challenge is communication. This means everything - grammar, vocabulary, diction, accent, familiarity with jargon, parts of speech, colloquialisms, everything. To make a requirement understood itself is a challenge. Asking questions about that requirement when faced with a roadblock, is again a bottleneck.
As an Indian, who's worked in most of the English speaking countries, and now working from India, I can just humbly say this - never outsource to cut costs. This will bite you hard in the short run. Only if you have processes set, softwares used correctly, procedures documented, should you look into outsourcing. And that too it should be for reasons other than purely financial. As an example, having remote workers across time zones helps in maintaining support for your global customers better. Similarly, time zone differences can be used to your advantage. Finally, interacting with different cultures can only improve your organization's awareness, maturity, communication and global reach.
That's literally the same argument about the "Fight for $15" - the argument is 'yer gonna get automated'. That's going to happen no matter what.
Also remote workers are easier to automate because employers know precisely what they are doing.
Remote work is turning out to be a requirement for hiring people. So once the company starts bleeding (good) people who find remote jobs with other companies, they are going to be difficult/impossible to replace.
At some point, the execs will have to suck it up and offer remote work.
I don't think this is fair characterisation. If you have kids, working from home can be quite stressful.
> And to all of these people I will say, go to the office if that's something you want, but don't make me go too.
Generally almost no one gives a shit if you work from home or not. The only one caring about that is your employer, and you should negotiate with your employer about that. No need to complain about everyone and everything if you can't find an employer willing to let you work remote.
If I were running a large company I would create many small satellite offices around the metro area that employees could sign up to work from. Might even be worth purchasing a few large RVs and renting space and power hookups in good locations while figuring out employee preferences.
Those initial waves of offshoring were nothing compared with what COVID did. Wait until this affects labor prices.
Did it, though? GDP has just reached pre-pandemic levels.
Worker productivity is not measured in GDP. It is a component of it, but asset and resource prices also factor into the equation. Nobody is going to suggest taxi drivers can go fully remote and work from home, yet that still feeds into GDP.
I've seen this with my current employer. Their message has been that going forward at some point, "Working remotely is not an option."
There's really no reason I can't work from home. I've been doing it since March 2020. I don't have any customer-facing responsibilities; I administer servers and write code. The only thing that requires my physical presence is the occasional need to install or replace hardware.
It was one thing to not support remote work in 2019 when it was an unknown. In 2021, we've proven it can work; workers know it, and employers should know it. There's no un-ringing that bell.
I'm older, and have no desire to return to the startup lifestyle again but there's no doubt I can find remote work. As I see it, the choice is mine, and taking a mini-retirement and looking for new opportunities if my employer wants to be inflexible is not exacly unappealing.
Since the pandemic kicked off, this has changed. Despite the fact that there are many employers out there trying to force everybody back into the office, there is also a large pool of companies that have realised the wheels didn't fall off during the pandemic.
I've been speaking to a lot of current and ex-colleagues in the tech industry. Both on the management and on the employee side. Even the managers are increasing looking at where they're going to work from long term. Realising that they really can move to cheaper cities (in Europe), possibly with better weather, and keep working just the same.
I think there will be a bit of tension this year, but I can't see it just going back to the way it was previously. So many of the previous objections are just obviously false now. In a lot of cases I've seen teams become more productive (not to mention happier), because they're not sitting in an office.
I've seen the faces of most of their kids and pets now, and it turns out that's pretty cool as well.
That BBC host was a real trendsetter :D
So which do I prefer? Ehh, it depends. I'm not planning to live alone forever, it's just where I'm at right now. I'd imagine others are in a similar boat; we're different, and not necessarily constant either. So, as much as I encourage opening the offices back up and will take part in that space if given the chance, I wouldn't force that on anyone. I think the responsible thing to do is to measure performance rather than seat-in-chair, and so long as everyone's pulling their weight, let each employee make their own informed decision. It's their health on the line, after all, and healthy employees do better work.
IMO, there's no one "right" answer on this issue beyond "more autonomy", and I suspect we'll see more contractors/freelancers in Coworking spaces and more WFH arrangements to accommodate that, even if it's not touted publicly much.
It's somehow fine to have a group of people you've never met work in India, and they can get their work done OK, but you can't do the same thing from 15 miles away from your main office? Just insane.
I've heard a lot about this claim "no lost productivity". However that is for the employer to be evaluated, not for the employees. The complaining employees lose credibility when they make claims like that in complex fields, because productivity is very complex metric to be measured in many jobs.
This is what's interesting about the 'remote work doesn't work' group. My first bigCo programming job in the late 90s was at a satellite office with another single developer. We built a lot of software with developers from other satellite offices using only email and phone calls. /shrug
But if they are discrete teams, working on discrete services, then the issues tend to be around management, collaboration & communication patterns (both human and technical). Those are the areas which many companies can't handle or don't have correct to enable useful outsourcing.
Why have your employees work remotely in a city 100 miles from their original office at 80-90% of the cost when you can have them be 1000 miles from the office at 30-40% of the cost.
If you find employees in Central and South America they would also be in the same timezone.
Of course it was less about cost and more about the ability to quickly provide additional resources, and it was done with the upmost care to make it still feel like one team, but it doesn't have to be a nightmare.
And this isn't even related to Covid, I've been working remotely for 6 years.
Everything I do is carefully tracked. Every line of code is logged and timestamped. All my assigned tasks are viewable by anyone, with every associated line of code one click away. When I am connected to the VPN to access work resources, everything is carefully logged.
If we need to do a meeting, we use Microsoft Teams. You can chat with me whenever you want, and can schedule a video call whenever you need to.
At least with my job, a senior software engineer, there is zero need for an office.
I realize not everyone is in my position, and there are plenty of jobs that do require you to go into a physical office space. This career is not one of them.
If employers discover that they can pay less (in real estate and salary!) if they offer remote work as an option, while keeping the efficiency of an office worker, then the companies that do this will have a competitive edge. If companies discover that having employees in the office is a competitive advantage, then I don't care how harshly HN lambasts office work, it will make a comeback.
I expect the result will be somewhere in the middle. Certainly different jobs and industries are going to be affected differently. As HN is mostly computer jockeys, I have no doubt that remote work will be more common to the people here.