Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely (2023)

I suspect that 40% drops quite a bit after 6 months of unemployment in the current market. Boom times are over. We're back to falling in line with the rest of the working class, as the capitalists have captured enough of the market to force our hands. It was nice to feel special for a while, though.

Nice try :)

But I'm afraid the glorious past for employers is not coming back.

We've all seen with our own eyes that working remotely is fine most of the time, there's no way to unsee it.

About time too.

I feel crazy sometimes, because I'm the exact opposite. WFH has been a disaster for me. I just joined a team with a hybrid schedule (3 days in the office). I'm there every day, but it's pretty dead on the other 2 days. If they close the office and go remote-only I will quit on the spot.

Interest rates are dropping. Jobs are appearing and new ideas are forming. There will probably be fewer silly startups. Hopefully we will see some new technology that has a meaningful impact.

Can you explain what has not gone well for you? How has it gone for the rest of the team?

The first two sentences are in opposition to the third sentence.

Having the option is the point, people are different.

But that's only because the proletariat does not collectively own the means of production -- yet.

Hacker news is a pretty strong echo chamber for the work from home crowd. When covid hit there were many people at my company who really struggled with working from home. The reasons ranged from having kids or family interrupting them, being stuck in small condos, some of the new to the country employees relied on office time to get to know coworkers and make friends, others just really disliked working alone or wanted physical separation of work and home life.

Often the people here on HN try to make it out that anyone who appreciates or wants to work in an office is evil or stupid or the like, but honestly probably half of people actually want a few days in the office. Comments here are not actually representative of the whole industry.

I think that misreads the market. From what I can tell, the RTO efforts reduce headcount without layoffs and the costs with those. It's not as if these companies are hiring to replace the people not moving. RTO is about financials, IMHO.

I've been talking with people in the tech sector and getting hired is hard for far too many people. Remote or in-person.

I can neither deny nor resist market forces, but I abhor RTO. There is a staggering amount of signaling and ritual utterly divested from delivering outcomes.

To be honest I think perhaps more than 50% of “work” need not be done. It’s a game theory dilema and tragedy that we put each other up for these charades.

I see this power struggle in job applications. The companies who really want to hire talent will include a remote option. Those with a more constrained vision will insist on hybrid or even full RTO. As an applicant the first thing I do is to filter out the latter.

40% say that, but how many actually do?

+1 work - life separation is a must. And not everyone can afford a home office. Also isolation is a real threat.

I get that point of view, but for me, being alone in an empty office isn't much better than being alone at home. I'm not trying to force people to be in the office, I just want to find a team where people WANT to be there. It seems very hard to find, but it's also hard to believe I'm the only one in the world who wants to be part of something like that.

As far as software goes, the proletariat is the means of production, which explains the focus on getting LLM's to write code.

I agree, people's creativity in grabbing cash from VCs has no limits. You'd think you've lived long enough to see enough and the next day you get another surprise.

But maybe that's the way it should be - a lot of rubbish and among them one good idea that gets developed and actually make some positive change.

you're not going to convince companies by condescending to them.

What has worked well is agreeing on a few days where people will focus their office time, no forcing involved. Make a thing out of it, buy lunch or whatever.

The only thing that changed is the power balance. It's still perfectly possible to get skilled workers into the office, they just have to want it.

What was the survey methodology?

There are local politics involved where a company might have some kind of tax break or favorable leasing to offices. There are also municipalities concerned that having less workers in downtown areas would reduce economic activity with the shops and resturants in those areas.

I have also heard that productivity for remote government jobs is not as high.

For what it's worth, it was 41% [1] in our sample as of a blog we posted this morning, and a good chunk of those people have been out of work for that long.

[1] https://framerusercontent.com/images/5R1ZfThrPbROdkJ8pHw8qvD...

But it's the truth, and companies that don't adapt will have to settle for the most desperate.

With bosses doing stupid shit and increasing efforts to treat engineers as replaceable cogs, I think we're in a great moment to work towards unionizing larger swathes of tech.

Unions are a way to collectively make sure that we (as workers) get what we need from our jobs, like optional remote work, lay-offs structured to minimize disruption (eg, volunteers-first, ensuring options for internal moves), and so on. Things we'll be hard pressed to argue individually, especially as the McKinsey increasingly colors us as replaceable components.

The article talks about 18% of jobs in the US market are now remote.

oh yea because " I get to spend more time with my kids" and " I am too lonely to wfh" are equivalent .

If the team is mostly in-office, the out of office workers become second class members of the team.

I'm pretty sure few people are being forced to work remotely, it's an option.

Covid was different because school-age kids were home too, which made a larger portion of situations untenable.

tax breaks for what though?

Not having to pay taxes for the land the building is great and all but still more expensive than just not having that building. Possibly even more expensive than a smaller building.

To me personally, working remote makes me feel like I'm working completely alone. For me, it's hard to feel like anyone cares what I'm doing, which has made it hard to make myself put in effort. That's a recipe for a downward spiral, which is exactly what my work has been since the pandemic.

I'm not saying the office is some perfect, joyous or highly social place or anything. I just think for me, it makes a big difference to have a place (different from my house) where people come together to work on common goals, and occasionally interact face-to-face while doing it.

Not the author of the OP, but we find nearly-identical numbers (slightly higher, in fact - see blog post in my submissions) in our data, which is self-reported by people signing up with us looking for jobs. When they enter remote-only, they're taking themselves out of contention for in-office jobs, so it's a fairly costly signal.

How about putting it on the table? As in: talk about it in the team and come up with ways to improve the situation together?

I have a mild preference for working in an office but I'm developing a very strong preference for getting out of the Bay Area/New York/Seattle complex. And unfortunately the in-office jobs at good companies are very concentrated.

How many people who had to Return To Office actually got their own office?

(2023)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35090739

They are. They're arbitrary wants/desires that have nothing to do with the job

There was a point in my life where I craved working in the office also and seeing people who also wanted to be there. And now I can't imagine going back to one.

I miss nice offices though. Before the whole let's stack people side by side on desks, rather than give them some nicer spaces with lots of room for deep thought. When I was working for HARC, we had a nice former industrial space near UCLA. I totally could go for that, but when the only way to get something semi-nice and private is to work at home, well, that is going to bias people.

except you can work on your loneliness and try to have social interactions outside work.

I guess you can say " you can try not to have kids so you can work from an office" . I have no answer to that.

Even the VCs will tell you that is the case.

There's been a concerted effort to reset salary for tech workers in the past year or so, ever since Elon Musk kicked things off with the mass layoffs at Twitter. The default of Silicon Valley Bank didn't help, and neither did the VC money pulling back for all but AI.

One of the hidden chilling effect is Section 174. I don't know why it is such a big blind spot among tech workers. (Section 174 ruling means US companies can no longer expense software development, and must amortize it. That creates a significantly higher tax burden. It is driving companies to shed all but their best engineers, and drive AI adoption. I don't even know how startups are going to start up without enough capital to cover the higher taxes).

If you are working remotely, you can move somewhere that you can afford a home office..

You’re being downvoted, but exactly.

The persons responses basically amount to: I can’t manage my time and need others to validate what I’m doing.

Take some personal responsibility.

I have this dream that the closed down/ghost shops blighting towns and cities across the UK will be converted into co-working spaces.

Your employer rents a desk for you, you probably get to walk to work or at least enjoy a very short commute. You have people from other employers around you for the social aspect. Etc

I guess WeWork was a similar idea that shows now is not yet the time for this.

I still think it’d be great - reduced commuting miles / time wasted. Cheaper offices that are nicer (don’t like this co working space? Just book into a different one) etc etc

No wonder there is rampant age discrimination in tech. Who wants to hire older workers who want to silo at home, avoid mentoring juniors, and force teams to have video calls when the rest of the team could have met in person?

Ohh I'll come back into the office for the right price.

Let's say I'm remote and making 140k. I can live wherever I want. If a recruiter was like "If you come to NYC we can hit 190k".

Think about it. After taxes that's a 25k increase. Rent will be an additional 2 to 3k a month over what I'm paying now. Plus I'm spending a minimum of 45 minutes each way commuting.

So I'm already losing money on this. At a certain point more money wouldn't even be worth it. I'd need an additional 50k take home for this to make sense, which due to how taxation works quickly prices me out the market.

Basically I have a WFH job and unless I got a ridiculous offer, I'm not giving it up. I imagine if I finally get a FAANG job with 300k TC I'd consider it.

The problem with that is that pushes towards collective action come when people feel weak - which is exactly the time at which they have the least leverage. Good bargaining power comes from a place of strength, like what SWEs had 5 years ago. But in that environment, it's easy to think of your boss in non-adversarial terms, because they're incentivized to keep you happy because they know someone else could poach you. Tech workers, and SWEs in particular, mistook their market power for virtue on their employers' part.

When it's a sunny June day, it's too easy to blow off why anyone would ever want a jacket.

I'm not in this 40% but I would not relocate for a job unless there is a significant financial upside but the offers I get are typically lower than what I currently make.

Forcing five-day RTO is still ridiculous.

Collaboration is much easier in the office, but I find home much easier to go heads down, headphones on and work on something; hybrid is the sweet spot for me.

It all depends on the rest of the company. It's a big difference if the whole team + management are remote, and there are established practices to work that way, vs most of the team is not remote, and just a few individuals are. I find the last part harder. Not impossible, but just harder for everyone.

During the pandemic a lot of in-office teams were forced to adapt quickly, and that doesn't always work well; it takes time to build a culture around that and some people just don't work well that way. So not too surprised that after sometime it was declared a "failure" and everyone is forced to RTO.

For me, I was never in the office to start with, so there is nothing to "return to". I know I am taking a pay cut picking choosing, but I picked to spend more time with my family instead of commuting. It helps the environment, too. But being with my family was my top priority.

Same boat here! :)

This is a gross mischaracterization of the stance. I want everyone to have an office to go to anytime they want— always, sometimes, never. If you want to make me go to the office we'll have words.

We have forced-office and office-available, no one is arguing for forced-remote.

It's not crazy to have a personal in-office preference! I'm very much team WFH but I recognize some people have temperament or home environment that will make WFH difficult. And also that there are sometimes specific types of work and phases of projects that benefit from a lot of in-person collab.

It's probably even reasonable to organize teams around similar styles, preferences, and demands of the actual work output. But it's good to recognize that a LOT of IC roles benefit strongly from greater control over their work environment and time, which can often be achieved via remote (and even a lot of managerial work that's high contact light touch direction can benefit from the tooling and organization required to support remote work).

What's less good is to universalize. It rarely reflects detailed attention to organizational and individual needs and output. It's more like the fad that produced the categorically inexcusable open-plan-office. Where it happens, it's often a cover for something else, or a reflection of limited interest in good management.

To put some less anecdotal data to this: an 80th percentile salary ask in our data set (from engs looking for jobs) is 33k higher [1] for an in-office job than it is for a remote one; a lot of those are people who already live in HCOL areas.

[1] https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/quantifying-the-cost-of-rto

I can manage my time just fine! The problem is that I find it very demotivating to be working completely alone, and enjoy working with others around. It's a personal preference, no more complex than that.

Ageism was already a thing before COVID sent us all home.

Did I miss where the article mentions that those workers tend to be older?

Also - why does working at home imply any of those things (besides video calls).

Finding a work environment that makes you most effective and productive IS taking some personal responsibility. Different people have different needs, and a big part of responsibility is understanding and managing your own needs relative to those of others.

None of those things change by physically being somewhere else.

Nobody cares what you’re doing because they’re sitting vaguely near you.

Those rose colored glasses are goddamn dark, my friend.

Then go to coworking space? Jesus. Stop trying to ruin everything because you’re lonely and want to shoot the shit by the water cooler like it’s 1952

Not the author of the OP link, but we don't find any gap between senior and junior candidates (a reasonable proxy for age) on remote preference in our data set. Every subcohort is somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s, all within a few percent and well within MOE for the size of those subgroups even if you treat the sample as completely independent (which of course it is not).

"now" being 2021. 2021 was still solidly within the pandemic. It would be interesting to see if that number has gone up or down since then.

Larger businesses tend to be more on-site focused.

That is uncharitable and dismissive.

I find it so hard to understand this type of militancy. In what other situation is it normal to respond to the statement "I have a preference for X" with "no you don't / you have issues / take responsibility for yourself"? I prefer working with others around and I'd like to work with others who feel the same way. That isn't a personal attack on you or anyone else :)

There are three things I refuse to do for any company. I have never had a problem finding a job, even in "down markets". It does greatly constrain which companies are a fit, but I think understanding your own boundaries and being honest about it is actually crucially important to being happy at work.

My three refusals / boundaries are:

1. Work permanently from an office building, unless I am given a private office with a door that closes and locks.

2. Work within waterfall processes for software projects.

3. Work on an almost entirely outsourced team (whether that's "on-shore" or "off-shore" is irrelevant, contractors don't have skin in the game)

That's pretty much it, I'm otherwise remarkably flexible and have done a lot of interesting stuff in a lot of different domains through my relatively lengthy career. I've been permanent remote since 2015, so since well before the current WFH shift. For senior level technical people with unique skills, you've always had the leverage to set boundaries in even really poor labor markets, and even more so as you move up in corporate rank.

If I'm given a private office with a door that locks in a reasonably decent office building, and I am paid an appropriate amount to live within a reasonable commute without sacrificing my quality of life, I'd consider working in an office again for awhile. But so far I've never had a company that is willing to provide private offices for anyone below senior executive (SVP+) level, so remote it is.

I dont think that is a contradiction to the parent post.

It certainly seems like there is a shift in supply and demand. When getting hired is hard and you have mortgage payments due, how many people are willing or able to turn down offers because they are "WFH" only.

You aren't alone, although you're in the minority. In our data set, around 9% of candidates are looking for in-office work only (we find a similar value to the OP - 41% - looking for remote work only).

That's an advantage for you, though! Active desire to work in-office greatly reduces the amount of competition you're dealing with for jobs; all else equal, it should ~double your success rate.

not to even mention cost of living, which can be an enormous difference

some smart people find office collaboration more dynamic and effective

For example, when Amazon looked to build HQ2, they were entertaining packages from municipalities, many of whom gave tax breaks for building HQ2 there.

TSMC and Intel also shopped around the country for new fabs, a combination of geological stability, water resources, support by municipal and state governments. Offering tax incentives were a part of that package, with the expectation of increasing job opportunities.

The tax breaks are not for the land, but for operating there. These often involve contracts with milestones.

Some bigger companies actually own very extensive office properties as part of their asset portfolios.

Yes, many people are asking for offices to be completely abolished, turned into housing, or other things. Also, working is about compromises, we had some full remote, but we did ask most people to come in 1-2 days a week to work with their coworkers who wanted to have an in person meeting. We never had an issue with it, most people came in because their coworkers wanted them to, maybe 1-2 were hardcore at home forever types like you seem to be. But that was the extreme minority.

But no, I don't think I'm grossly mischaracterizing anything. Even replies to my post are literal personal attacks against the OP for not wanting to stay at home, or actually making fun of the reasons people want to go into an office. It's truly toxic behaviour.

Thanks for the explanation.

Can you imagine feeling fine with more frequent WFH yourself, if something about the culture changed?

For example, could you otherwise get the vibe that people were engaged and wanted to be working together, even when it was on intermittent chat and videoconf?

(And if there were occasional in-person meetups, if only for more personalizing or focusing?)

Commercial real estate has been teetering on trigging the next Black Swan event for the past couple years. No one wants to be holding title to buildings that are vacant and not generating rent.

Seems like the greater story is landlords taxing the economy to death.

Are you wanting to be around other people, or specifically your team? You might try working from a co-working space if you want to be around other people.

I am very biased as I am from the Austin area, but this is a big reason why I still live here. Everywhere here seems to be very hybrid friendly and the suburbs are close and very cheap in comparison to those 3 cities.

I don't know if it's different in the UK, but at least in the states, tech companies only have offices in the most locally-expensive areas, so if their offices were converted into co-working spaces, I'd still have to commute to them.

If every neighborhood had at least one pub and if every pub had an upstairs co-working space, that would be amazing.

edit: ah, I realize now that I took the word "shops" to mean the colloquial "tech companies", but you probably meant brick-and-mortar retail stores that have been slow-killed by the internet

It's also just freedom. For example I wanted to visit a few cities and see some concerts.

Had a great time doing it, and as long as I stay in the US it's not a problem.

I actually really like NYC, to visit! Best food on Earth.

A few years back I interviewed with a company that would let me work remotely anywhere on Earth ( with reasonable limits of course). It wouldn't of paid more that 120k, but I'd rather do that than make 200k in NYC.

Seems like supply and demand to me. Supply being artificially controlled.

I'm not surprised

I've heard people say to turn empty offices into housing but not kick everyone out to do so. I think the disconnect is that if you think 1-2 days in office is the compromise you don't get why remote work is valuable. Half in office is still in-office. I don't own workwear clothes, we only have 1 car, I can stay a few weeks with friends in other cities with no issue, I get 2 hours more sleep every night with a consistent sleep schedule. All the good perks happen at actually remote.

Office available with social events and meetups is supposed to be the compromise. The part that I can't wrap my head around is what is gained by making someone who doesn't want to be in office show up? The folks at $dayjob in that position literally just sit at their desk with headphones for 8 hours.

Your dream can already be true, just use the turkish barbers and betting shops as coworking spaces. Cheaper too

WeWork was killed by a dishonest CEO, and problematic financials. As far as a product, it was pretty great to drop into a random town or city and be able to have a hot desk to work from.

I'd love to do the Doctor Evil gesture the next time a recruiter contacts me about their great onsite-only opportunity: "Yes, I would come back to the office for... <gesture> one MILLION dollars per year!"

Neither are the companies. It's a two-sided market.

Some smart people will have to settle for the most desperate coworkers.

He's ruining it for everyone because he prefers being the office?

Landlords are just like almost all the programmers reading this page, they want more money. The downstream consequences are secondary concerns at best,especially if it doesn't personally affect them.

Okay, that's useful information. But then the number is 40% of engineerings seeking employment, not overall. It is also for those engineers using your platform, which will also be a biased sample.

This touches on the core of the problem.

The only thing that changed is you can no longer force people to the same degree.

One alternative would be to design offices that people like to work in.

I like busy cafés for focus work, with music in headphones.

The background hustle keeps my brain going but it doesn't bother me since it has nothing to do with me. Nice coffee helps.

That's awesome, I'm glad you have the option to work in a way that fits into your life.

Forcing others into the office just because you want their company is definitely a bad idea.

The way forward is finding ways to work together that the entire team is comfortable with. And employers thinking of employees more as humans and less as resources to be manipulated and squeezed. It will take compromises and growth, but it's far from impossible to achieve.

Sorry you feel the need to be babysat, the rest of us are here to get shit done.

hahaha

Programmers generally don't have extractive power. They don't sell water, power, land, medicine, or legal defense. They live by pure appeal or die. For the above mentioned domains it's often the reverse; you pay or you die.

It's why the poor in the US have such a difference in life expectancy.

The corporate tax burden is not my fault and I'm not going to pay the company's tax bill for them, they can get reckt.

All the BS that we saw where local govs were giving multimillion free deals if Amazon would locate there was a travesty, because of where that money comes from.

Welp, Business 101 would call that the Sunk Cost fallacy, throwing good money after bad.

There are no metrics that show RTO is anything other than management trying to control people, all the metrics out there show WFH is way more productive and profitable. But companies have a perverse incentive to keep the executives who bought into the CRE bubble when it was already a zombie in 2006.

Want me to work in the office? Offer me an office with a door.

Always so weird to see people threatened by something so trivial. I like offices! Sorry that frustrates you, pal.

Maybe I’m not stating it clearly: I want to work on a team that’s in the office full time, which I don’t currently have. I’d take a pay cut to get it! If you know of anyone doing this, please let me know. Not hybrid. 5 days in office, for everyone.

would you say that... rent seeking... is bad?

Texas for example, threw tons of tax breaks to companies to get people to move to the state. One of the reasons Apple has a Austin campus, for example.

The lack of payroll tax (and income tax), is in theory made up for by the increased number of people and businesses in the state. This leads to more people buying houses and cars (property tax), or buying things in general (sales tax). And more bodies in turn create more demand for goods and services, driving the economy more.

Now, when the bodies are leaving, the state and municipality are taking a hit -- their big tax cuts aren't being hedged by personal spending because all of the persons left.

That also crushes other demand: no one is using gyms near their office, or getting gas to/from work, or grabbing coffee and lunch at places nearby. Fewer sales there, so even less tax, and eventually less people working there and potentially going out of business.

So consequently a lot of cities and states straight up said: get them back locally or we cut your tax breaks, and executives shrugged their shoulders and said "so be it".

I want my work to be in-office full-time and I’m going to keep pushing for it. Consider that from my perspective you’re the one “ruining it” for me.

1) it's not a black swan if we see it coming, or could see it coming, and predict what it will do

and 2) the massive rise in residential housing prices correlates to that risk, as commercial holders want to get out ASAP or at least hedge their risks by buying and renting.

Yes, studies show people are more likely to want to come into the office if they have a nice office to come into. But what's the point of paying say half a million/year for an engineer if you also have to give them a nice space to be productive in?

Anyways, it isn't a mystery why people want to work at home these days, and they don't really need to be in the office anyways considering how hard it is to get conference rooms to VC all the time with your partners across the country or world.

That seems completely irrelevant to the question. Even if it is for entirely sadistic reasons, that doesn't mean the numbers are as high as they were in 2021 or that everyone that wants a WFH job today can get one.

And some smart people find working remotely more fulfilling and focused.

It's a matter of preference, over time the companies who do RTO will attract talent that prefers that, remote companies will attract other ones. There are smart people in both cohorts to be alienated if forced to do the other option so I don't get the argument. It's self-selecting if the options exist, the pandemic opened Pandora's Box.

At this point, reloacating is off the table without some guaranteed minimum working time. Been burned way too many times by sudden layoffs to risk moving my entire livlihood to get dumped in 1-2 years.

Double of "no one is hiring" is "no one is hiring", sadly. My experience with hybrid/in-office hasn't been much better WFH. I wonder if Los Angeles is being hit even harder than most of the country for some reason.

I do worry about the junior talent in the future, yes. This attitude it part of why Juniors aren't sufficiently trained into future seniors. Then everyone wonders where the seniors went.

They don't grow on trees.

Depends on your pay.

I think the opposite will happen.

Using your illustration … “market rate for your position is $190k, but since we’re hiring remote - that means we can also hire someone in a developing country for 1/5th the cost.”

Great for people in developing countries.

Bad for those who were already highly paid.

Return to Open (Office), silly. Imagine wanting privacy in 2024.

> For senior level technical people with unique skills, you've always had the leverage to set boundaries in even really poor labor markets, and even more so as you move up in corporate rank.

I'm stuck in that "early senior" phase, so the downturn hit me at the perfectly wrong time for leverage, sadly. My domain doesn't help much, either. No one's really safe here.

> That also crushes other demand: no one is using gyms near their office, or getting gas to/from work, or grabbing coffee and lunch at places nearby. Fewer sales there, so even less tax, and eventually less people working there and potentially going out of business.

Yeah but at the some time downtown became more alive, the center has shifted so to say or became more fuzzy.

try meetup.com or local facebook running groups ( if you are a runner) to beat loneliness.