Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters

I read your basic point though that there are complications/expenses associated with having remote employees in other states ("I generally advised clients against remote employee arrangements"). I've worked for very small firms that did this so it couldn't have been too onerous. But it does serve to highlight that, especially small, companies aren't indifferent to where employees move to even if they're remote (and may prohibit certain moves).

> I can’t imagine staying home all day everyday

I can imagine it, because I've been doing it every day for the past year. It sucks. It sucks a lot.

I can't even count the number of people in my tech circle who went from (pre-covid) "ugh, so-and-so works from home at an all-remote company, that sounds fantastic" to (early-covid) "wow, working from home is fantastic, I can start a bit later, no boring commute, this is amazing" to (late-covid) "holy crap fuck working from home, i never want to do this again, I'm over it, get me back into an office".

COVID itself had something to do with this, in the sense that never leaving your home, for work or play, is exhausting, and makes work-from-home worse.

But, I don't think most people will disentangle that from the reality of how they feel. I think many, many people want to get back to the normalcy of a commute and office life. And, a few years from now, we'll all be tired of it again. And that's fine.

This whole "remote-first" wave we're seeing is almost entirely isolated to tech jobs in tier-1 tech cities (SF, Seattle, NY). That's definitely a situation where, many many people wanted to get out of the city pre-COVID, due to rising costs, and COVID-fueled remote work became the excuse they needed. Then, companies corroborated by going all-remote because corporate real estate is expensive, and if its what employees (and especially c-suite) want, lets do it.

I fundamentally believe that its not the wide-spread movement that's so easy to conclude it to be. First, because many people want to go back to an office, especially outside of tier-1 metro areas. Second, because going remote is fucking hard on your business, and executives generally aren't dumb, they know its hard. Collaborating asynchronously? No one can do it. Human beings don't have the patience. Scheduling a 60 minute meeting because a topic isn't resolved in ten minutes of Slack chat? So fun, much asynchronous. Documenting everything? Ha. Nope. We can hire anyone! I mean, in our timezone, maybe +/-1, because timezones and latency are a fundamental, physical, law of nature bitch and a half. Sorry, my microphone was muted, and my dog is barking (and if you think we're going to "solve" online video chat in our lifetimes, go buy a printer and realize we haven't even solved that).

Also, to some degree I hold the controversial opinion that many of these "pioneering" remote-first companies (Gitlab, Coinbase, Spotify (to a lesser degree), etc) are generally involved in product domains which require, lets say, less creativity. I love their products; they're absolutely fantastic, and I don't mean that disparagingly in the slightest. I simply mean that their biggest problems are generally operational in nature, or have relatively well-defined edges. If you're at a company where you can't even imagine what your product/project will look like in 12 months, where you need zero latency high creative output from your team, remote is even harder.

I have a friend who works on Azure, and she said they were seriously considering full remote. Its like, duh, that'll work great for Azure, because they're highly operational and a ton of their product development is just "what did AWS do last year". It works for some companies, and it definitely won't work for others, but maybe they need to go through the pain to realize it.

I think the word is "subpoena"? Subpony is quite fun though.

I have to know what you do for a living that building and running one of the largest clouds in the world is "highly operational".

Long-distance is not impossible, it's just known to be objectively inferior to in-person interaction. I think it is silly that mainstream tech is flirting with this idea of "remote 100% forever". The best people want to be in the same room as the best people. This is human nature. The only people promoting "remote 100% forever" are the people working in big tech that stand to gain from forced-remote.

People don't want to sit at home all day in zoom calls. You can try to prevent people from being able to see each other in person, but those attempts will always eventually fail.