[Hard_Space]

As a remote worker, I think there is an assumption of 'necessary common suffering' which continues to make remote work a 'privilege' rather than a simple logistical alternative. So long as there are on-location cubicle-dwellers who might get disgruntled to know that other employees are living some kind of fantasy high life from home (working in PJs, etc., all the tropes), then providing any remote working options becomes a potentially destabilizing force for a company.

Making a remote worker's income less attractive is one way to redress that balance of perception.

I'm not sure how much progress we are ever going to make towards remote working as core practice, since the last decade has re-built a collapsed economy on the basis of hyper-inflated urban property values in 19thC-style urban conurbations such as NYC, SF, Tokyo, London, etc (and, increasingly, smaller satellite cities that had not benefited in this way until recent years, but have now become super-distant commuter communities).

The net-enabled, 'dispersed' society is probably further away than it has ever been because of these factors.

[stakhanov]

First: It's just horrible to build a company culture around assuming pettiness. I'm not saying that it isn't true that human beings are often petty. But you shouldn't optimize around being a great place for petty people to work at.

Second: Being forced into an onsite job in a city with high rents and bad traffic is bad. Being taken advantage of on salary for living in a low cost-of-living area is also bad. One badness doesn't cancel out the other. There are just so many instances I can think of of going to a manager and making some argument that's a variation on the theme "Can you please stop treating me badly?" and the response being "We treat all these other people badly, so if we stop treating you badly, that would be unfair to them!" Well, that's just not a valid argument! I don't want to be treated badly, and if not treating me badly implies not being able to treat these other people badly, then maybe that's the route you should be taking, goddammit!

[barry-cotter]

> I'm not sure how much progress we are ever going to make towards remote working as core practice, since the last decade has re-built a collapsed economy on the basis of hyper-inflated urban property values in 19thC-style urban conurbations such as NYC, SF, Tokyo, London, etc

Tokyo’s rental prices and house prices have moved very little in the last twenty years while the population has gone up by half. If you let people build housing you can have huge increases in population without increases in property prices.

> The net-enabled, 'dispersed' society is probably further away than it has ever been because of these factors.

Fully remote companies exist and their numbers will only grow. There were very few of those ten years ago and there will be a lot more than double the current number ten years from now.

[buboard]

> Making a remote worker's income less attractive is one way to redress that balance of perception.

That sounds wrong, and there are now plenty of companies that are fully remote , for which it is the stationed-worker who are a burden