I definitely could see the government creating incentives to get people back to work. The big issue of people no longer commuting, is millions of people working auxiliary industries which are getting screwed right now. The guy who works at the cafe next to your office, the landlords who own buildings, even car mechanics.
I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.
I like remote working, and I've done it on and off for more than 2 decades. It suits me.
In my experience, mentoring junior devs and new hires on my projects is much harder for everyone involved when you're not in the same office. Sometimes you're lucky and get someone who'll speak up and ask questions when they get stuck, but often (especially with juniors) people will just try to figure things out on their own in order to not look bad at their job or incompetent or something. Some devs would rather spend a whole day on a problem and only bring it up in the following day's stand up than show they can't solve it alone. That is really bad for a project. I find I have to poke the quieter juniors regularly on Slack just to make sure they're OK, but then people get annoyed about being micromanaged. This is something I really want to solve...
One thing you can do is let people flounder and fail on irrelevant small tasks for a week or two early, to help them learn the lesson that they don't know what they're doing.
The best way to make someone appreciate guidance, is to have them fall on their face, receive guidance and notice the difference.
One suggestion I had was, if you're stuck for more than 30 minutes, ping me. Juniors will almost always be stuck with something trivial you can answer within a few minutes. It gives you a break and it is something they really appreciate. If you communicate to them that they're not expected to know anything and that the first few years on the job is their real world education and a chance to ask questions without raising eyebrows, they'll be far more likely to do it.
Juniors are nice in my experience, you can mold them into something half-decent if they've got a bit of a brain and their mistakes are ones of innocence, not cunning or apathy. It's the 'senior' devs who don't know shit that you have to put up with that's almost always a disaster. They'll be well versed in lying and politics, wasting everybody's time.
Exactly the same here for exactly 20 years. I make my own products and make products for other companies as consultant.
No real problems when I need to hire subcontractor though. Being an old fart I know many very experienced people who would never pass an opportunity to make some dosh.
As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation.
There's still plenty of remote work, just make sure you don't go into this completely blind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_employer_organiza...
Why not make your laws more friendly?
I ran out of cream for my coffee at 3AM in Amsterdam. But of course there's a 24/7 nitrous oxide delivery company in Amsterdam:
I'm not a customer, but I would only consider it if they'd actually deliver fresh cream without any nitrous oxide at 3AM, to keep up the pretense that the N2O was actually intended for making late-night whipped cream.
But no, they brashly deliver incriminating accessories like balloons and "Slagroomspuit" dispensers. But no cream! Fuck that.
https://amsterdamlachgas.com/lachgas-toebehoren/
Somebody should start a 24/7 milk and cream delivery service. DeliverMOO!
I think you could make a killing delivering 24/7 fresh milk, cream, and dairy accessories like breakfast cereal and chocolate mix.
As someone who has posted many remote Who is Hiring posts, I know that they've had little bearing on our company's decision process to move new roles back in-person or stay remote.
Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same.
I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open
https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... (2017)
The pool and quality of candidates we interviewed pretty much went up overnight and we started getting a lot of quality internal referral.
Wasn't a company-wide move however.
Disclosure: I work there.
I can handle, and honestly prefer being alone most of the time, but WFH was not enjoyable for me. I prefer collaborating in person.
Would be cool (and likely even more dramatic) to see the chart going back 10(?) years.
But, there was a belief amongst all management that they had to have a central place for everyone to gather and do business.
Now, Covid forced the remote issue on many companies. Many companies are crunching numbers on remote work productivity and leasing expensive square footage in expensive cities.
Some decided remote is costing too much in productivity and requiring people to come into the office. Others are finding out that productivity drop is much smaller than expected and office space cost savings are fully justified in going full remote.
This will take at least couple of years to fully shake out and see what the remote situation looks like in the future. One interesting side effect of companies going fully remote is that office space costs will likely drop and change the calculations again, convincing many companies to gradually bring people back to central office.
I know this may sound obvious but let's also be mindful of that fact when we go around saying that everything has gone remote. For most people it hasn't.
That said though -- very cool analysis. I love seeing analysis from huge amounts of social media data like this.
