Remote startups will win the war for top talent

Non-remote simply means asshole bosses.

If the work is not obvious, it's almost certainly not important.

If you can't communicate, changing where people are located won't help.

Please don't lock me into a room to stare at you while you slowly gather your thoughts. My time is important. Gather your thoughts and then present them. Don't make me babysit you.

This will just shake out into a market like anything else. Some companies will be remote, some companies will be in person, some people will be remote, some people will be in person, and for the more in-demand companies and employees they will get to decide what they prefer, the less in-demand companies and employees will need to just take what the market offers them.

I too would like to know.

I like remote work and have been doing so for more than ten years. I have found that the way people interact and socialize is different in-person than it is through remote tools:

  - Chat workspaces like Slack requires very different etiquette
  - Zoom and video meetings requries a different etiquette. You can't use body language to signal when you want to speak. On the other hand, the chat backchannel enables interactions you can't do with in-person meetings.
  - Writing and speaking engages different areas of the brain. Someone who is good at speaking is not necessarily be as good as writing, and vice versa
  - In-person work favors good speakers, and remote work favors good writers
  - The intuitions for how much to communicate is different between in-person and on remote. If you are used to in-person work, remote work requires a communication style that will feel like overcommunication, but it is not.
  - Socialization on remote, distributed teams are less spontaneous and requires more concious effort
  - When there's an in-person gathering with some remote people, remote-people tend to get forgotten. Decisions and ideas favor the people in-person. 
  - When I joined my first distributed team (that's not as a solo contractor), the engineering manager made sure the team still got together periodically, because there are some things you can do in-person that is not so easy with remote. This can include going to conferences. It is far easier to get to know someone as a person (and not as their role) in-person than it is by remote
  - Some line of work favors remote than in-person, and vice versa. Software engineering can favor remote ... but not as much for creatives (like game studios) or sales.

Perhaps one day, we'll see "How to Succeed at Remote Work Companies" in the self-help/career sections of the bookstore.

The company I work for now organically grew into a distributed company. It did not start out that way, and the fully remote guy who came in before me pioneered the practices, equipment, to make that happen. (E.g. company all hand meetings were remote Zoom even though most of the people worked in the same office). The engineering team embraced remote-first, starting with the remote, morning standup. Some of the sales team in the field would remote in from time to time. When the lockdown came, the sales team got hit the hardest. They made it work, pioneered things like social time, and ended up embracing it when they hired remote from all around the country. Remote became part of the company culture.