[NeverFade]

Yes, many employers would rather that we physically commute to their offices every morning. They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it.

However, as the talent crunch keeps getting worse, and CoL and local income taxes keep obliterating pay raises, employers will have to find ways to reward the talented senior employees they're all competing for - and it won't be simply paying them more to work on-site in ultra-high CoL locations.

As more employers offer remote work options, the remaining employers will have to match - or risk losing many of the best candidates, especially senior engineers who aren't going to try to raise a family in SF or Manhattan.

Also, once the process kicks into high gear, it will be hard to reverse; engineers will move to suburbs in states like Colorado, and it will be very hard to get them to move back to extremely expensive areas like the Bay.

Arguably this is already happening during this pandemic. I know many engineers who moved to remote locations with no plans of coming back.

[ck425]

> Yes, many employers would rather that we physically commute to their offices every morning. They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it.

This is factitious comparison. Remote works great for a lot of people and it's undoubtable good that there are more options. But there are legit reasons for both businesses and employees to prefer working from an office. Office working isn't some ploy by evil employers to sweat every last drop of productivity from their employees at the employees expense.

[NeverFade]

Remote work is a coveted benefit, subject to the same economics as other coveted benefits: employers will have to offer it as it becomes normalized, and offered by their competitors in the war for talent.

Similar to how office food benefits used to be extremely rare niche, and now are extremely common.

Not sure where you got "ploy" or "evil employers", nothing in my post implies those things.

[ck425]

> Not sure where you got "ploy" or "evil employers", nothing in my post implies those things.

"They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it."

^ That's where I got it from. The framing that office work was something employers forced upon employees against their will. Many of us prefer an office and are keen to get back to one.

[myWindoonn]

You might not know the history of employment. Employment is the latest iteration of a series of systems which require the bulk of the population to contribute labor to shared efforts which are designed by small elite groups. Your society explicitly asks you to trade labor for food, shelter, and other basic benefits of living in a civilization.

Specifically, we know that 12-hour shifts (without overtime or adequate breaks) were a thing that employers would want, because they used to exist. Similarly, we know that employers would want to pay below minimum wage, because they used to. In fact, both of these things still happen regularly today, despite the laws having changed.

Yes, when we look at history, we often feel that folks were doing evil/bad/harmful/etc. things, because we can't help but judge them based on our values which we hold today. The best that can be said is that people are complicated and that good/evil is not a good framing for weighing why people did what they did.

[teh_klev]

What's "CoL"?

[erik_seaberg]

cost of living

[teh_klev]

Thanks.