It all comes down to hiring the right people. The problem with remote is many companies hire the wrong people so they end up not doing the right thing. Then all of the people who are good get punished.
Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
Now everyone expects it, and lazy/weak managers will just make everyone come into the office vs having hard conversations with crap employees to tell them they cant work from home.
> Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
I'm coordinating with developers in Europe, South America and East Asia. The customers are all over, but mainly North American. I'm in Europe. I've seen some of the customers once or twice in person, I see many of my European colleagues at the yearly get-together. But all the contact and all the work is over email, phone and video conferences and the usual mix of other remote collaboration tools, ticket system, git, stuff like that. When I enter our local office, only one of the 50 people working there has anything to do with that I do. My manager is 800km away. Well, there's payroll over here, but the only time I'll need to "visit" them in person is when a paycheck is late ;).
Even before COVID, the world shifted towards remote, even when you HAD to come to the local office because of reasons. COVID just showed everyone what a charade it already has been for the last decade to force people into an office just to get on phone/email/git and work remotely from the office. COVID cut out the stupid useless "going to the office" step.
In the 2000s, it wasn't like that, teams were concentrated at some offices, offshoring wasn't that much of a thing yet. And for lots of things, travelling e.g. to meet a customer was accepted and normal, far more often than it is now. A new contract was a 2-week stay at the customers'. Back then, remote work actually was a privilege. But the world had changed long before COVID, slowly, then very quickly.
Not to mention the trend that had long been going on, to make the office ever more impersonal, with increasingly more open floor plans, hot desking, having to move your stuff in and out of lockers at the start and end of the workday, etc.
WFH should be the ultimate dream of these companies, they can finally get rid of those pesky meatbags and their 'emotions' altogether.
Yes, but unfortunately sometimes no. I've also seen a rush to get along with less office space but still have all the people come in, e.g. with hot-desking and an early-morning desk lottery at the gates, huge soulless open-plan offices (but at least the shared desks are wiped down twice a week now, hurray!). Yet attendance at the office was still mandatory, even if your team got a seat 3 floors and 200m away somewhere else in the building (because they had to bring kids to school and didn't get their pick at the desk lottery).
So management wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. Everyone in an ever smaller, ever more unusable but supposedly cheaper office. Concentrate all the smaller offices in the suburbs into one huge big-city campus, making the commute a nightmare. But people have to be at their desks, or else. Remote was officially rolled back.
Unofficially, even middle management wised up and just ignored the back-to-office mandate, because they wouldn't know anyways who was in and who wasn't.
Can I ask where in Europe? I'm also looking for something remote friendly as most companies in my area have pull everyone back in the office and I hate it.
Germany, a company formerly part of (and still somewhat associated with) Siemens. But I'm not sure I can recommend it, depending on which department you land in, it is the proverbial German corporate bureaucracy. And depending on the department, they can be anything from totally-100%-homeoffice-friendly to totally-100%-opposed. And all the other big-corporate-clichees times 1000.
I kinda feel like the comparison between an on-prem vs cloud. For the longest time, big, old companies clung onto their data center spaces. No new start-up would ever dream of that though. They would be cloud first from inception. It's probably going to be the same for new companies vs old ones.
The push to cloud happens even when it makes no sense for customers at all. I'm in the mergers and acquisitions consulting space for IT and there are a lot of very mature, stable non-it companies that can save millions going colo vs cloud when we spin them off but the push is ALWAYS to cloud, regardless of the costs.
It's now a selling point when buying a company that the infrastructure is cloud based, even if it's IaaS that has been stable and unchanging for 15+ years - and they require the staff to maintain the servers regardless of where it's hosted.
Problem is that the board and investors are usually also heavily invested in commercial real estate, to the point where artificially propping it up is worth more to them than the company.
Well, culture is just so many rocks you can hold onto while swimming in the market. My regards to the inner city bubble who based a buisness on that millstone being kept afloat.