- The people who need to stay home to take care of their children and family members.
- The companies who can't find [good] enough local talent, or can't afford them.
- The people who can't find jobs locally and cannot move, due to financial, familial, environmental, or other reasons.
- People with diverse needs who require a flexible schedule and safe space.
- People who live in dangerous places where commuting could put them at increased risk. (see: can't move because of X) (also: commuting is actively dangerous to your health; constant sitting, danger of traffic collisions, being robbed at bus stops, etc)
- Anyone who wants to live in a cheaper, less dangerous city, or doesn't want to commute a long time.
WFH can benefit everyone, but they have to learn how to work a completely different way, and most people are lazy as hell so they don't.
You're right, I left out a lot of life situations that could benefit. Let me be a little more specific:
- if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from.
- if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.
- if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)
So yes, if you just need a paycheck for skills you already have, and that can be done remotely, that can be convenient. If you are looking for more you need to consider these kinds of tradeoffs.
The young people I know hate going into the office, it's all the older folks that want to go in. I've been almost entirely remote since I've graduated and haven't missed being in person at all. I've developed my skills more being left alone and having time to read and learn on my own than I ever have being forced to sit in an office and struggle to be productive. I'm absolutely not established, but I've had no issues convincing others of work of my impact. You simply need to take writing seriously and learn how to communicate your work.
Companies are just learning they have terrible onboarding processes and documentation. Turns out those things are important and being in-person is an expensive and poor quality bandaid.
Yeah, the only young people who I know want to go into the office are interns and fresh-grads. There is a lot of in person upskilling that happens in those years, but after that, learning is effectively self-guided.
There are 2 kinds of jobs in tech. Demanding jobs and chill jobs.
Demanding jobs involve effectively resigning your life to the company for 5 days of the week. The hours saved on commute and ability to actually get chores done between at-home downtime allows people to put a lot more hours from home than from an office.
Chill jobs on the other hand, lead to a terrible commute vs hours worked ratio. You're in the office for 40 hours of the week, but spend 5 hours commuting, 5 hours chilling during lunch break, and another 5 hours waiting in line to select one of 10 fancy coffees. That's effectively 30 hours of work, 10 hours of in-office loitering and 5 hours of out of office mind-numbing commute. Make those same people work 'real' 40 hours from home and you'd see a 30% productivity increase just from hours saved. Remote employees take meetings during lunch, coffee is instantaneous and there is no commute.
People complain about how much better in-person meetings are. But, have we even tried to make remote work palatable. Slack and Zoom are terrible tools for remote work. Give every employee a 2000$ digital whiteboard. Make them stand and give their presentations using better cameras. Use gather.town to make collisions feel more natural. Guess what? with remote work, all your meetings & interactions can be captured. You can send out meetings summaries & key screenshots for every interaction without ever lifting your finger. But nope, remote work is relegated to having the same in-person secondary tools (zoom, slack) without leveraging new primary tools that work well for remote work.
> if you're young you probably want to be around others to learn from
You can easily learn from coworkers working remotely, I personally have had no issues doing so. The idea that you can't is a weird one and I have no idea where it comes from.
> if you're not well established, you want others to know you and see your impact.
So make others know you through your impact. Your work speaks for itself. If you have to be in person to demonstrate your impact, are you actually having an impact, or just making a show of having one?
> if you're struggling financially or to find a job, you probably don't want to compete with the whole world for basic employment (especially against low cost of living countries.)
Low cost of living countries come with plenty of their own barriers that prevent hiring, and out-sourcing isn't some new concept that has emerged from the pandemic era of WFH. On the contrary, what has emerged is the ability for those capable of WFH to move from high COL areas to low COL areas, or for those in non-traditional hubs to gain access to high paying, high quality jobs they didn't have access to before without relocation. Its a huge boon to those struggling financially.
Yep, this is exactly who WFH benefits, and nobody else.