The great displacement is already well underway?

Am I a bad person for laughing when I realized he ranked "Wordpress theme developer" above the "rock-bottom" of applying for a non-remote job?

(Typing this from an office.)

It feels like we're living two separate lives when it comes to remote work. If my office was a 5-10 minute walk then in-office could be fine. I used to longboard to the office and I didn't have too many complaints. But after getting 2+ hours of my day back every day, an extra hour of sleep, gas money, not having to meal prep or get take-out, and work among my at-home comforts not under wight fluorescent light and an oppressive HVAC it's really hard to imagine an in-office job getting preference over basically any remote job.

I did the hour commute thing, I hated it even when it was the norm.

I hear you for sure. I personally have the luxury of working remotely on a semi-regular basis when I'm not on site at a client's location and I love it. I have worked remotely on and off for 20 years and it is not all gravy though. It does get kind of lonely sometimes. On the flip side, in my early career, I worked with a one way daily commute of 90 minutes or 3 hours a day! That was sure a kick in the crotch.

A co-worker in NJ had a 4 hour commute one-way because of the I-80 potholes.

This is just so he could sit in an office while all of his teammates were remote in other locations.

But isn't that a textbook self-caused problem? You could live in the city and have a 5-10 minute walking commute. But you choose to live somewhere with a lower cost of living, more space, etc.. and then complain about the commute. It feels like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and (for OP) it's predictably backfiring.

I was just offered a job in Capital One (the bank) in Mexico city(mexican living in a cheap state in Mexico). I declined because I already have a remote job and I prefer that.

But, if i didn't have that luxury, I would not hesitate to sort my stuff to go where the work is.

People that refuse to work on site and instead remain unemployed remind me of the saying "we've done nothing different and we are all out of ideas" .

Just 20 years ago we HAD TO go where the jobs were. We've become very entitled.

I mean I do live in the city, 10 minutes walking doesn't actually cover that much distance. It gets me to the end of my street basically. I'm genuinely struggling to think of any US city where you wouldn't have to move any time you changed jobs to maintain a short walking commute.

Isn’t the cause the unnecessary requirement of onsite? This forces parent into the least of two bad options.

A cause not in your control is irrelevant. The industry is pretty clearly moving to RTO, and for cases where remote is possible, several workers in a third-world country for a fraction of your pay is clearly a better value prop.

The things you can control are 1) where you live, and 2) where you work. It's sounding more and more like the options are "live somewhere cheap and make pennies" or "live somewhere expensive and make decent salary".

People like OP stuck in the "remote or death" mindset aren't going to have much luck moving forward.

Yeah of course, it depends on your city. But you're not going to have a two hour commute within city limits.

My city is conveniently on a quasi-island, so the sprawl is naturally limited -- if you get a place somewhere near the center it's a 20-minute walk to all of the "ends".

It seems common for people to struggle with something that's, to simplify, bad about the world, and to get many responses along the lines of "do x differently to deal with it." These responses may help the person or may not, and I'm completely in favor of responding pragmatically to your circumstances, but a fundamental function of the exchange should also be to change minds on the thing that's bad about the world so this happens less in the future. The individual complaints can be the trigger for that change, or can help it along, but instead usually get mired in responses which suggest individual solutions. I don't think that's smart for us in the long run.