How is the remote vs in-person trend looking?

This doesn't quite answer your trend, but personal anecdote:

I recently switched jobs, and as part of my job interview process, I was pretty firm about only looking for companies that were working at least part of the week in the office. I just really thrive on in-person work.

Fast forward a few weeks... and I ended up taking a job with a startup that was fully remote. I loved their product, loved the founders, loved the team I had met; I figured I would make it work.

Two months in and I have hardly noticed that I'm not working in person. There's just such a huge difference when you're working at BigCo remotely and working at an eight-person startup. Particularly at my company, people just really give a shit and it shows. I feel genuinely connected to and engaged with my teammates. Makes remote work a lot better.

We are still full remote and I don't think anyone has any intention to go back to "in-person" honestly.

As a side note: I think the reason you are going to find so much friction with this is for the first time in recent history "workers" (specifically software engineers) have incredible leverage over management. I honestly don't think we've seen this since the days of labor unions.

Think about it: software engineers have such an in-demand, ubiquitous skillset that they can command huge salaries, get incredible perks AND now they can say "I don't want to be constrained to a location". Don't like your job? Don't worry about it, get a pay raise and you don't even have to change your office (because it's your bedroom/study/den/whatever). Boss is being a dick? Move and get a raise. Don't like co-workers who talk to much? You don't even have a water cooler to gossip around!

Software engineers have so much power now it's ridiculous and it honestly pisses off a lot of people who spent their entire lives brown-nosing and grinding only to have a young hotshot come in and earn more than they ever did at their age. I mean if I could get $5 for the number of times I've had older people tell me that I'm being too greedy for demanding SWE comps because "I never earned that much at your age" I could buy a really nice house in the Bay Area.

I was looking for new work this year and found a company which hired me for +40% salary increase and remote/timezone free.

Personally I have young kids and therefore prefer flexible times, fully remote etc.

Being in Europe, I think fully remote is getting embraced. It‘s the third company where I get US level salary plus all the benefits (30 days vacation, unlimited sick leave etc).

I see a strong trend from young families moving to the country side and paying off a house from one tech salary. At least in my circle.

I hope it stays.

Thus being said, I am a bit nervous moving away from tech hubs and having to hope this remote trend truly stays. What if there are no good remote jobs in a few years or I get laid off? Being in a tech hub still seems, somewhat, more secure to me.

I'm in the interview loop with two places atm (one is Google) and they're both remote. Last time I was frantically looking hard in 2019 I couldn't find any remote positions, so it's still a lot easier from my pov.

Also I've found that submitting job applications through LinkedIn's 'easy apply' thing is rarely successful. It doesn't seem like recruiters often check that. I've had the most replies from going through the company job posting websites. I know it's a pain in the ass but shrug

My guess is that the current market conditions will accelerate the market toward whatever the new normal will be. Companies that hated having to give into demands for remote work will use this as leverage to get people back into the office. Companies that were going to look at remote work as a way to save costs (either by hiring from cheaper regions, saving on real estate costs, or both) will be pushed into those decisions sooner, and companies that were remote first, or on a path to it, in order to get the best talent will be pushed to improving their remote work processes so they can be as efficient as possible.

I’m not going to try to make a bet on where the lines will get drawn between remote and in person, but I expect hybrid work will become less common since it often ends up being then worst of all worlds (you pay for office space, limit your hiring pool, and decrease worker efficiency by encouraging repeated Covid exposure leading to both more short term leave due to sick employees and less effective employees in the long run due to long Covid, but you still have many of the organizational, communication and infrastructure challenges of a remote team)

For some hard data, in San Francisco and NYC, the mass transit agencies are starting to plan for never getting back to full ridership again. And by plan, I mean starting to ask for federal funding to keep the systems alive (which I think they should) because the fare revenue is never going to return to pre-pandemic levels but the physical plant remains just as expensive to operate.

Keep in mind: these are two of the densest cities in the U.S., where people typically have less space for a home office and commutes are shorter vs an exurb type city. WFH is here to stay in my view, especially for employers in competitive recruiting spaces.

My team at ParkMobile is looking for a Staff engineer (Golang&Kafka), fully remote but if you're in Atlanta you can come in the office. There is normally one or two days in a month where we have an all hands type meeting or planning where they want us to come in. Even those days aren't mandatory but if you are in Atlanta, it's expected that you will show.

For Parkmobile, we have been battling to hire in the past year's ultra competitive market. We still have a ton of hiring to do and are probably even looking to accelerate our recruiting. I would imagine there are a number of companies that for one reason or another aren't freezing hiring because of the economic climate.

I think we have been very productive since going remote but I do miss the camaraderie in the office and I believe our "culture" has taken a bit of a hit. There are less interactions outside of what is specifically scheduled on the calendar. This leads to more focus during the day but I am one who thinks great things come out of casual conversations with people in the office that I don't directly work with every day.

Anectdotally, I get more fully-remote offers from recruiters. They used to be rare exceptions, most contacts would basically end with me saying "I'm not moving to London/Amsterdam"; some would try to fake it ("yeah we said remote ok, but actually that's just a day or two a week..."). Now most will say "fully remote" upfront and stress it throughout.

I reckon the UK sector in particular has finally locked on the realization that they can save boatloads of money by hiring outside London/Thames Valley, and the sky will not fall if IT folks are not lined up in big City offices like chickens in pens. Covid was a big game-changer.

Early on (during Covid) I made the decision that remote work was not for our company (SAAS for financial services) and two years in have zero regrets about it. We are clear about our expectations so there are no surprises to employees and new hires (or we filter out people that want it). Most of our clients in financial services have reached the same conclusion.

One of my clients at a large bulge bracket said “if these people insist on not being in the office we may just outsource the job for a tenth of the comp”. I think more companies will take that view personally.

Our attrition is sub 5% over trailing twelve months. I get what works for us isn’t what will work for everyone else.

Based on my own experience as a SWE (Working with a previous company up until May 2022, job searching from Feb 2022 , and now at a new company)

The vast majority of companies are willing to hire remote, but a lot only within locations they have the legal means to do so (eg. Legal entity, contract with Deel or other company). It seemed during 2020/early 2021 people were saying it was going to be a "global job market", which in my understanding meant you could get a job in any country in the world, easy.

While it's true in my experience you can get a job in any country in the world, it's not that easy. A lot of companies do not want to hire outside areas they have a legal entity in, Eg. a company has an office in Paris, they'll hire remotely anywhere in France, but good luck if you're based in Spain.

Companies that will hire most anywhere are far and few between, and generally from what I've seen are smaller, startup/small business sized companies.

Take the above with a pinch of salt as that is purely my own experience, and could be bias based on what I was looking for.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the CEO of our company was very adamant about working from home being a temporary situation, with all of the usual explanations.

Although I still have to go into the office occasionally to things that can't be done remotely, midway through the pandemic I had decided that I am going to work from home as much as I like from now on. And if this company doesn't let me, I'll switch jobs.

Earlier in this year, the CEO set a "back to the office" date of June 13th. I've been in occasionally since then and it's still basically a ghost town. So apparently most of my co-workers have the same idea as me.

My company maintains an office, which some people local go in once or twice a week. But it's 100% remote-first, and everybody (including leadership) has no desire to go back to "in-person-first". The remote shift was a major boon to hiring - being able to recruit talent from all over the US.

I just joined a new company fully remote. Been working in a fully remote company during COVID. I receive offers in Linkedin where 70% of them are fully remote and the rest are hybrid (I don't receive offers which are 100% on site. Funny). So, I think fully remote is winning so far. This in Europe.

My large FAANG-equivalent company has been trying to mandate return to work for months now, but employees simply ignore them. After 2+ years it's hard to believe things will ever return to "normal".

Not an engineer, but I am in software development; I'm about to accept an offer after only having gotten serious about applying ~1 month ago. Applied to ~17 roles between ~2-4 weeks ago (all but 1 fully remote), and the role I'm about to accept was the second place I applied to.

There was no shortage of fully remote roles, in fact.. there were so many new ones popping up every day on LinkedIn that I was quite selective about what type of companies / projects I applied to (avoiding financial/health/crypto and anything else that felt dull or ethically questionable).

In my own personal experience... the "widespread hiring freeze" feels like little more than media sensationalism.

In Europe here. Still working remotely. Saves me tons of time. We get our stuff done. Recently had a few days office work, which was OK for a workshop, but I wouldn't want to have it every day or even most days of the week, because of the loss of time.

There is a voluntary office day now and I'll try to make it work. I hope it stays voluntary and does not become mandatory.

I interviewed a lot this year; the amount is probably between 50-75, with at least 15 take homes (all 100% remote jobs). The great majority of those came from LinkedIn recruiters, and that all sucked, I got three offers which I declined because they weren't great. In the end, what got me a new job was my blog and the branding I have on Twitter. At some point my posts where getting traction, and companies started reaching out to me. It got me a job without even interviewing. If it wasn't for that, I would probably still be interviewing with recruiters on LinkedIn.

I'm currently looking for a job, and in my experience everything is at least hybrid, and a lot of places are full remote. I've not interviewed with a single full on-site company so far. Remote-first companies, if they have a good process in place, can have a huge advantage in terms of access to talent.

Personally I enjoy being in the office 2-3 days a week as long as the commute isn't too bad, but I'm seriously considering going full remote as it opens up a lot of life possibilities.

I don't know if this answers your question, but my employer (engineering firm) just announced last Friday that starting July 5th being in the office Tue-Thu is mandatory. Then Sept 5th Mon-Fri is mandatory. Pre-covid there were very very few remote positions at my employer, we are going back to that I guess. I've been going in Mon-Fri anyways, so it doesn't really effect me.

I've been at Forbes for 5 years now. 2 years ago we went 100% remote; we're still committed to 100% remote. Many job listings still showing: https://boards.greenhouse.io/forbes/

Unsure how it is out there - I've not jumped jobs because it's been great here so far.

I just don't understand why some people are so keen on making in-person or hybrid work, it won't in the long run because you are competing with companies that doesn't have the overhead of an office, HR, logistics etc. This is the new normal, you either accept it or keep trying to go back to what will never be going forward.

I also don't really believe people claiming they are losing productivity in WFH, its most likely that they were never productive to begin with and its becoming magnified.

The latter group often expresses it emotional terms like : not having human interactions, missing out on watercooler talks, acknowledgement. Perhaps these emotions are being surfaced because there is nothing to hide behind anymore.

My experience as an engineer with ~10 years of experience (4 of which working remotely):

I've seen no data that'd indicate a meaningful shift yet. I've also seen no shifts from recruiters reaching out to me about in-person roles. All recruiters reaching out highlight that the positions they're looking to fill are fully remote. (I receive anywhere from two to ten outreach messages per day)

That said, my experience doesn't mean that there isn't or won't be a shift, but I haven't found or observed any evidence yet. I believe there is still an abundance of work for engineers wanting to work remotely right now. The remote opportunities are far, far better than any time previous to 2020.

I think we should be anticipating 1-3 years in the future when much more comfortable VR/AR glasses come out. Then the question for knowledge work will start to change from "do they require physical presence?" to "what type of virtual presence is required?".

Because the details of interactions matter a lot and it's also important for companies to have firm policies. The most basic one being that you communicate effectively, appropriately using the tools available.

Within say 1-4 years, we should expect VR/AR to become much more like physical attendance. There will be 3D realistic rendering of faces, eye tracking and eye contact, 3d positional audio, and as I said, much more comfortable gear unlike the sweaty huge headsets.

So it's actually going to turn into a new battle to avoid bosses breathing down your _virtual_ neck. What the conversation should be is about the full range of types of presence and synchronous or asynchronous collaboration and work product distribution.

I think we will end up with more effective management and organizations because of a greater range of possible arrangements and more pressure towards actually measuring effectiveness based on work product. Managers that aren't qualified to judge intermediary work products will be eliminated or at least less common.

But we will see a lot of the types of office interactions that were supposedly only available in person start to become common in remote work using AR/VR.

I switched jobs recently and when I was looking, it was definitely the case that remote work was advertised as a perk.

I'm not particularly fond of wfh, and prefer a vibrant office setting, but I realised that I would have a hard time finding a place where in-person work would be the norm. So now I settled for a job where there is still an office, but most developers never go (my boss is at least there 1-2 times a week). I also don't go every day (it's a bit far), and since not a lot of people are there maybe I'll go even less, although I do find that I can work better from there.

It's not ideal, but for now I'm trying to make it work. I certainly like the flexibility and I don't think anyone would want to go back to a fully Mo-Fri in the office kind of setup (me neither), but I do wonder if we'll see a reverse of the trend in a couple of years where a nice office and a good in-person atmosphere will be advertised as a perk, too.

We'll see. 2 years of pandemic is not necessarily enough for everyone to make up their minds on their preferred mode of working. And while I know that "wfh or I'll quit" kind of people are very vocal, I also know a number of people who enjoy going to the office regularly. Ideally, in some years, wfh people will apply to wfh companies and in-person people will apply to in-person companies (with some flexibility around wfh, of course), and everyone can find something that works for them.

Berlin: most companies I know of are hybrid.

As a community organizer, I talk to a lot of people - nobody said that their management is forcing anything yet. My own experience is that management doesn't care in most situations, as long as the work gets done. And it does right now.

Reading online about it, I feel like most of the people who complain about this problem are in the USA, and that there's some kind of struggle between employees and their managers. Never felt this in my career so far, so can't really relate...

There are still good tech jobs but hiring is down compared to its high. Whether its down compared to pre-covid times - can't say. What I will say however is: job search sucks no matter what the economy is doing. If you want to skip as much bs as humanly possible look for companies where its still possible to talk to the founders one on one and only apply if you've basically already done exactly what they need doing. Don't waste peoples time.

I desperately want to work in an office again, but there are effectively no opportunities to do so. The companies doing in-office around here are outfits like Dish Network, that everyone knows are terrible employers.

Like it or not, the software labor market is now nationwide, and remote is the rule rather than the exception. I don't know how long that will last, as I see very obvious negatives to remote for creative work, but for now that's how it is.

I interviewed with 3 companies all remote positions and have been ghosted by all 3 of them.

I work at a fairly well known BigCo. Hiring hasn't really slowed, we're still generally soft on preferences.

Only those truly needed on-site (or want to be) are there currently. Remote is alive and well but you can smell it's trending back towards the option rather than the default.

Talk has started about returning to the office for a portion of the week. It's not being enforced yet but it seems to be trending that way.

I'm a little frustrated by it. Our handling isn't a return to normal, it's an overshoot.

I've been remote for years before the pandemic - it was known, my whole team is in another state.

But, now that the pandemic is over, anyone not > 50 miles away from the office has been encouraged to get an exception. The implication being, you will return eventually

Prior to the WFH spree I never needed this, but now I do - apparently. It could be good record keeping, it could be pressure to get rid of the non-believers.

One data point is that the company where I work, which was hedging its bets about returning to the office last time this year ("we're evaluating whether to take a hybrid approach"), has pretty much acknowledged that that's not going to happen, and has started hiring more people who work out of state.

Non-tech community college: We went back to the office last year except for some faculty that are still remote. Some of the classes are online and some in person. Classes with young mothers tend to move to 9PM at night.

I am starting to look for alternate setups to the traditional laptop for faculty. We used a webcam that had a flexible stand for the beadwork class to show the actual work up close. Testing a multi-camera setup with Blackmagic Design STEM mini with larger screen (TV of some type) and better cameras with document camera (think old overhead) and maybe a flexible close-up camera for craft work. I am firmly convinced that laptops are a poor meeting experience for presenters.

For some reason, I have in my mind September when we're going to see a lot more RTO of at least 3 days a week.

Also in my mind, companies that are either smaller or have a good idea of what they need their people to do are the ones that are going to be able to thrive and provide full-remote work.

BigCo's are probably going to continue to push for in-person as they are unable to determine what they need from their people so they will substitute face time and meetings to make themselves feel like progress is made.

Random thought: for me, hybrid work as a mostly-remote person was hardest when you had more than one person in a meeting room and the rest were remote.

I work for a large State agency, the last type of employer I ever thought would be flexible, and for all staff — support/secretarial, managerial, and attorneys — we are on a permanent (optional) hybrid model. Non-attorney staff can opt for a minimum of 1 day/week WFH, with the highest “ranking” able to do 3 days/week WFH. Some attorneys have worked out more WFH days but most of us are in the office 5 days a week now that we can be.

Not that it relates directly to tech jobs, but now that a work-from-home model has proven to be functional it seems like it should become more and more prevalent across the board.

I am a Scala software engineer currently looking for a new position. Nobody is offering remote, and two of the prospects explicitly told me that remote is no longer allowed.

It'd be useful to validate against multiple data sources, but Google Trends does seem to show a noticeable ongoing and increasing interest in remote work:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=60&date=all&q=r...

Edit: filtered link to category "Jobs"

My office has allegedly gone hybrid since April but very few people are coming in regularly. The boss has been 3 or 4 times.

The company I work for seems to be trending toward remote. It feels like a bad trend to me - quality of work is lower. Creativity is lower.

Put me in a room with a few other folks, some whiteboards and some laptops and magic happens. Hanging around the house and chatting on zoom+slack is boring, pathetic and produces no magic.

We are rapidly approaching 10% inflation and had similar numbers the previous two years. When inflation was 3% firms struggled to keep up with it. I see WFH as a inflation salary adjustment, this leaves me with high expectations for in person jobs that so far nobody has been able to meet.

And I consider myself a very good employee, at least I carry out all the tasks assigned. But the other day my employer said that he wanted to install a remote access program on my laptop, like Kickidler. What do you think, is it legal?

If your in cybersecurity, specifically some form of security engineering, it went and stayed remote after 2020. Thank you SOLARWINDS I guess. Caveat is this most applies to engineers in Sec, as knows how to cloud and code.

Seems ~80% office/hybrid. 20% remote.

Definitely trending to office. Remote as exception.

Companies that had covid full remote, then hybrid, will move to 1 day remote over time - maybe less.

My company closed all their offices this year. I’ve been full remote going on 11 years and I want to keep it that way.

here in israeli startup scene at least ,it looks like 3 days wfh hybrid is the norm for most companies, and many offers i heard had full remote option too

i am never going back to the office

looking pretty good papa