Seems like they’ll be forced to adopt remote first whether they like it or not. No company is going to be able to lay off half its workforce. The labor market for software engineers and most other professionals is still extremely tight. Until it’s otherwise, the workers are essentially in charge, and management will mostly have to accommodate.
High performer who is hard to replace? Sure, we’ll be flexible.
Low performer with 10 people lined up, ready to take the role? If you’re not in the office on Monday, you’ll be fired.
And the thing that gets me is some of the booming housing markets are far away from jobs. Tahoe for example. If you can’t work from home, it’s unlikely you’ll find another job locally.
Who knows, maybe all these folks thought all this through and took the risk eyes wide open?
That’s the situation now, but after 1000 remote tech workers move there and 500 decide not to go back to the city, 100 might pivot to lifestyle startups that employ 100-200 more. And now you have a little incubator that wasn’t there before and might grow a nice little self-sustaining eco-system. And once it gets going, it can always rely on the nice geography to attract some talent, even if the cities become huge employment centers again.
In a way, I think this would be a very healthy development for these tourist towns. They are too dependent on tourism, and even when they were prosperous before Covid, they had issues with high property prices (due to empty second homes and Airbnb) and low service wages. Having a healthy middle class independent of tourism would be great for their economic stability.
If so, that’s great and we could see some pretty interesting changes to the demographics of small cities.
If they don’t have a plan B, well... that’s not good.
Work has been pretty cagey about what post-pandemic is going to look like. Nobody is outright saying we’re 100% coming back to office or we’re definitely going optional WFH forever. It’s this uncertain “wait and see” that keeps us from pulling the trigger on Tahoe or Redding or somewhere else way out there and less expensive.
If they ever make a clear decision: “WFH is optional for all employees” we put our house for sale that day.
And, while I don't think people buying houses outside of commuting range did it for this reason, it is a clear signal that, if forced back to an office for other than sometimes trips, they'll leave.