wow, this article, and the discussion in this forum is doing a great job at substantiating an idea that's been swirling around my head for a long time now.
i personally have made a lifestyle choice not to work for any company that won't allow me to work largely remotely. i often apply to great companies who do interesting stuff and pay well, and then i hear "sorry, we don't do remote". that can be very frustrating. i'm losing a contract right now with a company that decided they were going to switch to a non-remote policy. that too was very frustrating. but the kind of data that's pointed to here really shows that the joke is on them.
think about the cost base of a completely centralized non-remote company: a large share of their employees' salaries goes into their landlords' rather than their own bank accounts. a large share of their time goes to crazy commuting routines rather than actual work.
tell your employees "okay, you make $140000 dollars now, but $30000 goes to your landlord for the privilege of being in the BA. work remotely, move to wherever you want, and we'll pay you $125000". both the company and the employee have $15000 to gain. that's 12%!
tell your employees: "okay, you do 8 hours of work now, and you do 2 hours of commuting each day. why don't you work from home for 9 hours instead." both sides win. the company gains an hour of work, and the employee gains an hour of time to themselves. if we subtract holidays, sick days etc. so that we assume that a year normally has 220 working days, that's 220 hours over a year.
cumulatively that adds up as follows: $140000 over a year for 220 x 8 hours equals an hourly rate of $80. $125000 over a year for 220 x 9 hours equals an hourly rate of $63. That's a 21% cost advantage for the company, and more money left over and a better life for the employee. Over a base of $125000 that 21% advantage is $26250 a year per employee.
i find it really funny how the word "coffee" keeps being brought up by people who deny that there's an economic opportunity here. when i lost my current remote contract, the argument was something like "sorry, our culture is such that so much information exchange is taking place over a coffee, and so many decisions are being taken over a coffee that we can't have you working for us if you can't be a part of that". someone in this discussion thread suggested that it's important to be able to "have coffee" with investors and co-founders. i get the point that we're all meant to be social creatures, and it's nice to be able to have coffee with people. but i'd seriously question the business acumen of people willing to value it to the tune of $26250 per employee per year.
the other thing i find interesting about this article and the discussion thread is that it's another example showing how markets always find a way to get into an equilibrium that rules out the possibility of any such thing as a "free lunch". the article mentions the idea of "building equity." my own first job was in a high-paying finance role, working with lots of other young people who come in with extremely naive ideas around the notion of building equity. "i'll work like crazy for top dollar until i'm 35. if at that point i want to deleverage my lifestyle, i'll always have that option. i'll be able to move to a trailer park and never have to work again in my whole life if it turns out at that point that that's what i want to do. by building equity i'm just expanding my options, never reducing them". the point i'd like to make is: earning more is easy. building equity at a higher rate is hard! the point of departure for your thinking might be "move to the BA because of the higher salaries". but then you start to think things through: "higher rents, higher costs of living, higher taxes, higher risk when you should find yourself out of work for a month, bad situation if you're foreigner, build a life there, then lose your job", and you inevitably conclude. "well there's no such thing as a free lunch in the BA either."