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> But there is another downside of pay cuts for remote workers: A remote worker does not have access to the same market as someone living in a hot cluster like The Valley.

It’s not another downside, it’s the very reason the employer can reduce pay. They are betting your supply and demand curves are moving in such a way that you will be willing to accept a lower price, because you won’t have a better option.

Let me take it another step: Every reason that it's "rational" that remote workers are payed less, i.e. not just a stupid faux-rationilization of the labor market reaching a new equilibrium, is evidence that remote work is a failure.

A world of resort-town skilled works chained to their hegemon isn't just terrible for workers. It's a terribly inefficient market: a "sharded monopsony". The very unplanned interactions that allow hot-spot workers to change jobs is also a big reason cities are such dynamic economies in the first place.

>So from my, completely egocentric, perspective it would be ideal if companies demand on-site one or two days a week,

Pretty much all the surveys I see suggest that this will be the most common outcome. Maybe roughly 20% fully remote and 20% mostly back in the office. Though doubtless not uniform across companies. (I expect my company will tilt more towards remote given that we were relatively heavily remote pre-pandemic.) Which implies that most will probably remain in the orbit of a larger metro; many of the jobs aren't in the city anyway. And many people will want to stay accessible to a metro for other reasons.

I had about a 45 mile commute most non-travel days at one point for a while. (I did take the train some days.) It was pretty doable 1-2 days per week but wasn't sustainable on a daily basis.

I'm applying to jobs now (in the UK) and I'm yet to speak to a single company that plans on a full return to the pre-pandemic normal. Everyone is either staying 100% remote indefinitely, or they're hoping to adopt a hybrid approach like what you describe.

It's a bad time to own city-centre commercial real estate.

For most people who have proven they can productively work remote, it's sort of a no-brainer. Even if they don't want to move to the mountains or otherwise go 100% remote, most people will at least want the flexibility to commute fewer days and spend some days at home/out-of-the-office for all sorts of reasons. (As well as more flexibility in how close they need to be to an office.)

This wasn't my experience. Most companies I talked to planned on having 1-2 days in the office per week. A few were planning on 100% remote.

I bet a lot aren't being open about how remote they will be also, to avoid putting people off.

I expect a lot of companies just don't really know how things are going to play out right now. So, unless you know that a position can be 100% remote for all time, the conservative thing to do is to basically say "You're going to have to live somewhere that allows you to commute in a couple of days a week." You don't want to put yourself in a position where you've told someone they can live anywhere in the country they want and then, in nine months, tell them "Just kidding. You need to move to London."

That doesn't contradict what I said. "Remote-first" was more common in my experience too than "100% remote".

Notably, the market is such that a skilled candidate going in and explicitly negotiating how remote they want to be has a good shot at getting it approved. At least if aiming for e.g. 80% remote.

It's also notable that now being someone with longer experience in working remote - especially managing remote teams - has suddenly become a very valuable skill.

> Pretty much all the surveys I see suggest that this will be the most common outcome. Maybe roughly 20% fully remote and 20% mostly back in the office.

While intriguing as an employee, this seems very pricey as the employer. Office space is expensive. Is it worth the cost given the low utilization? Would you really miss out on an excellent employee who cannot come in the 20% of the days others come to the office? How intriguing is it gonna be to hire someone who works the same time zone, is equally qualified but only costs 30%?

On the other hand, if this kind of thing became commonplace, you'd have the advantage that companies could hire you for less.