[ghaff]

To be honest, of course. If remote work is paying substantially better it's because higher paid people have jobs that fit under some technical definition of remote.

To your example, I don't work in the Bay Area but I'm theoretically in an office about a 30 minute drive away. However, I gave up my desk and only go in for meetings sometime. I'd definitely self-report as Remote even though I technically aren't.

I wonder if some of it is just changes in attitudes. Lots of people in tech and elsewhere (e.g. sales) have long spent very little time in their offices even if they had one. I wonder if they consider themselves Remote today when they wouldn't have in the past because they were technically in an office.