More bad news for remote workers

So, uh, big news out this week around remote work, uh, and there's a lot of bad news for people that have gotten into remote work or want to be doing that, uh, as a path for their career. Um, so the first one is the study that came out of LinkedIn, and LinkedIn, uh, said that in 2022, 18% of their jobs, uh, that they had posted were remote work. Enable people to work from wherever. Today in 2024, that number is 8%. In other words, the percentage of jobs listed on LinkedIn that allowed remote work is down almost 70% in just the last 2 years. Uh, but here's where it gets worse. The percentage of applicants, so of people applying for stuff, 40% of applicants are chasing that small number of jobs. In other words, the demand for people that want to work remote vastly outstrips the supply of those jobs, which is bad news for people that want to be working remotely. And the second piece of bad news is coming out of a lot of major corporations. They're implementing return-to-office policies, which are basically companies like Amazon. And this week Starbucks announced the same thing. Either you're coming into the office or we're gonna consider you having quit the company. And this is especially problematic for people that kind of reacted to the COVID pandemic and the ability to work remotely in a pretty positive way. They went and many of them came and bought houses in places like where I live in San Antonio, went there for a lower cost of living, higher quality of life, good schools, all that kind of stuff. And, uh, moved there hoping they could work remotely. And it was pretty smart, right? You could go have a situation where You got this high big city salary, but you could live in a low cost of living place like San Antonio, and you got the best of both worlds. But now those companies are changing their tune and saying, hey, either come to the office or we're going to consider you moving on. And that's bad news for those people because they can end up in a place like San Antonio with a lower paying job market, lower prospects, and they're stuck with a house living someplace where they don't have as much opportunity. And now there's two more trends happening that are really going against remote workers. The first is, is that the offshoring of American jobs, especially white-collar jobs, is accelerating. Latest statistics are that two-thirds of American companies have at least one department that they've offshored and done remotely by people not in the U.S., right? So companies are looking up and they've gone through the pandemic and said, hey, like, if I can have this employee work in Kansas, why can't this employee work in Argentina or the Philippines for 60 or 70% less? And that sucks for American jobs. Like, I hate that this is happening and that our current set of regulations makes it so, right, it incentivizes American companies to push jobs further and further offshore in search of cheaper labor. But this is not good if you're somebody who is an American, pretty much unspecialized talent living in someplace and hoping to get a high-paying job because companies are realizing and doing it that you can push those jobs even further offshore and get the job done cheaper. And potentially even better. And the second megatrend that has emerged this year going against remote workers is a lot of the media narrative, right? And you're seeing a lot of anecdotal stories about government waste, especially government employees who aren't spending time in the office, who are cheating and sleeping through and barely doing any work. Those anecdotes in the media, those, you know, they could be anecdotes or they could be data. Sorry, I'm next to the dog park. But they could be stuff that is, uh, that is true or not, and you don't know how widespread that is, but the perception is such that it creates a situation where companies and CEOs feel empowered to ask people to come back to the office, right? And use that as leverage and justification for what they're doing, uh, in terms of kind of ending and curtailing remote work. But look, I see it too, right? I see it in my friends who run companies and even in my own world. You know, it's much easier to feel like you're getting your money's worth as an owner of a company when you see those people in the office. You can see they're busy, you can see the value they're adding, and you can see how things are easier, right? You're, you're seeing people by the water cooler, you're seeing people at lunchtime, and it's much easier to understand that the company is getting a good deal with regards to an employee teammate who's around. And I see folks who are looking at, hey, I got to tighten the belt at my company. Where do I start? Well, like, it's hard for me to understand if my offshore employees or my remote employees are performing at a high level. So let's start there if we have to tighten the belt to the company and reduce costs. And yeah, I see it. But last point, it is not all bad news for remote workers. We're still in a situation where very highly specialized talent is rare in this country. And if you have it, you can still dictate your terms. So a recent study just showed that if, if you have a job posting that is over $250,000 in pay, which by the way, nice money, the average value of those jobs is going up. In other words, those employers are still having trouble finding highly specialized talent. And because of that, they're raising how much they expect to pay for those roles. And, uh, those people, well, if you say I'm gonna live in Topeka, or you can say I'm gonna live in San Antonio, and you're one of 3 people in the world, or just a handful of people that are in a highly demand space, right, with, with specialized skills, uh, the companies will let you do whatever the hell you want. Because if the choice is to hire somebody remotely and kind of bend the rules a little bit, or to not have that job filled for, companies are going to choose to have that person any day of the week. And it reminds me of a guy I ran into in an article who was like a high-end CTO for Amazon. And he had a very specialized skill set, very smart guy. Well, they let him work from his boat out in the middle of a lake or the ocean, one of the two. So if you have specialized skills and a unique talent, you could still write your own ticket. So going forward, like if you're an employee or a job seeker, I think you have really two choices. First of all, recognize that the salad days are over. The good times have to some extent ended for remote workers. Yay COVID. It was good while it lasted, I guess, in terms of the economic benefit for workers and the change in the economy. But it's not always going to stay that good. And just like everything in life, not all good things continue and the world changes. And that's the only constant. Uh, but the second thing as a job seeker you can always be doing and take away as a lesson from this situation is figure out how to have even more specialized, unique skills, uh, because that's how you create leverage as an employee. You get paid more and, uh, you get more of what you want, and that may be working remotely.