Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
Now everyone expects it, and lazy/weak managers will just make everyone come into the office vs having hard conversations with crap employees to tell them they cant work from home.
I'm coordinating with developers in Europe, South America and East Asia. The customers are all over, but mainly North American. I'm in Europe. I've seen some of the customers once or twice in person, I see many of my European colleagues at the yearly get-together. But all the contact and all the work is over email, phone and video conferences and the usual mix of other remote collaboration tools, ticket system, git, stuff like that. When I enter our local office, only one of the 50 people working there has anything to do with that I do. My manager is 800km away. Well, there's payroll over here, but the only time I'll need to "visit" them in person is when a paycheck is late ;).
Even before COVID, the world shifted towards remote, even when you HAD to come to the local office because of reasons. COVID just showed everyone what a charade it already has been for the last decade to force people into an office just to get on phone/email/git and work remotely from the office. COVID cut out the stupid useless "going to the office" step.
In the 2000s, it wasn't like that, teams were concentrated at some offices, offshoring wasn't that much of a thing yet. And for lots of things, travelling e.g. to meet a customer was accepted and normal, far more often than it is now. A new contract was a 2-week stay at the customers'. Back then, remote work actually was a privilege. But the world had changed long before COVID, slowly, then very quickly.
If you can reduce the office footprint you can save money. Bringing people in often means increasing the footprint post wfh.
Wfh will win where it actually succeeds because it saves money.
If it doesn't work then only companies that bring people in will succeed.
My feeling is that about 75% of the non manual non hospitality economy will go WFH
It's now a selling point when buying a company that the infrastructure is cloud based, even if it's IaaS that has been stable and unchanging for 15+ years - and they require the staff to maintain the servers regardless of where it's hosted.
>If it doesn't work then only companies that bring people in will succeed.
This implies fair competition between the two
