 Let's talk about working from home, remote working. It's all the rage today. Shopify, now Facebook, Twitter, Coinbase, even parts of Google, they're all talking about their employees with the next couple of years, majority of them will be working from home. So what I wanna be talking about is pros and cons about this, because on the one hand, there's a lot of benefits from remote work. But on the other hand, there's a lot of negatives from remote work. And there's a lot of variables. It's not a simple black or white answer. But for the most part, there's a couple of things in play over here. So let's kind of map it over here. COVID hit two months ago. Everybody wanted to lockdown, quickly scrambling to figure out this remote thing. And some companies quickly realized, wait a second, we don't have to spend X amount of money on rent. We can save literally millions of dollars on a monthly go by getting people to work remote. Now, interesting thing over here, right away initially, initially, I think it's over here, let me see. I don't know if you put it over here, but initially with Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg said, okay, we're going remote for the next couple of years. We're gonna figure this out. However, the remote work workers depending on your geolocation will have a pay cut. So it will be dependent on your location. If you are in San Francisco, that's your pay. If you're in New York, that's your pay. If you're in Idaho, that's your pay. A lot of people were having an initial pushback, but then this is what the market is. No matter where you go, the whole point of remote work, there's arbitrage opportunity. This is why you see massive amounts of developers in India and Eastern Europe. You're not gonna pay them the same fucking rates as you're paying people in San Francisco and people are up in arms, ah, well, you know, what can I do? Well, welcome to the global market workforce. If you don't like it, other people will come in and compete for your position. So let's talk about the benefits of working from home. Number one, it's the number one benefit is commute at the end of the day. You don't have to dredge your way through an hour fucking commute one way, an hour commute the other way. And so pretty much two and a half hour-ish of your day is gone, just commuting. However, a lot of people like that. You can say, I personally like walking an hour a day both ways as my time for myself to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. But that's a big thing for people is the remote, the commute is decreased. Number two, what is beneficial for remote work is depending on the human being that you are, and this is a big one. You know, a lot of people, at least in my experience with the companies that I have and have and the companies that I've advised is there is a certain person that can work remote and that's a minority. And there are the majority people who can't. Most people aren't self-starters. Most people need management. Most people need a certain structure in their day. And remote is difficult because there's no delineation between the office and home. Now, it's gonna be interesting with the remote work because I have a couple of questions. What happens with kids? What happens with the dynamic within the household for people that don't have a so-called office? Do companies unsubsidized since they're saving money on rent, do they give an allocated budget to remote workers like, hey, here's an extra $500 a month so you can allocate towards your office because at the office, you have your dedicated desk. That is yours. You have your own work station and that's where you get work done. At home, it's very different. Even myself, I've been remote work for fuck. I can't remember, man, all the companies that have remote work. But even at my home, I don't work 24 seven before COVID, I still have a hot desk. I go to co-working stations. I need the delineation between my home and my work. I find it very difficult to do my most productive work at my home. Keyword, it's my fucking home. It's where I relax, where I like to recover. It's not where I like to do work. Specifically, like I'm lucky, I don't have a huge family yet but people that have three kids, four kids, a husband and now the husband and the wife has to do home, to do work there and the kids is this dynamic change. Mind you, like I said, there's people that can definitely pull this off but it's gonna be interesting to see how companies look at this going down in the future and how people look at this. So let's look at this. Positivity, you reduce the time it takes to get to work and you save yourself headache. You save yourself time. So let's say if you traditionally woke up at six, left the house by seven, got to work by eight and then maybe started working by eight, 30. Now you can wake up at six and do whatever you want for two hours. More time with the kids, depending if they're in school or not, more time with the husband or wife, whatever partner, partner doesn't matter and then you start your work at eight. Then you maybe pause a little bit throughout the day, take a siesta and then get back to work later on in the evening. I think the remote work will be an interesting shift for people to realize the traditional nine to five. The whole point of an office is you create structures really good for onboarding. Remote work will never, ever, ever and I see a massive problem here. Remote work will never, ever, ever substitute proper onboarding of junior talent. I don't give a fuck what technologies you make on Zoom or whatever, it's almost impossible to substitute osmosis learning from hiring junior talent. And I think this is gonna be a lot of hindrance on people who are looking to enter the workforce because co-coding or co-development is learned through osmosis. It's not a structured curriculum that junior talent has. They join the company and work side by side within an ecosystem, within a project and they learn by visualization. They learn by osmosis. They actually see the work done in real time and they can ask questions through their peers. Here, I'm not gonna fucking do this on Zoom at all. And another issue though is the socialization aspect of it is we human beings are social creatures. And so now we're eliminating 50, 60% of the workforce and I don't have a clear cut answer. But the closest answer that I can come up with is this. I think we're gonna have a lot of companies realize that the remote work isn't that all cracked out to be because I'll tell you what, if you start your company in the remote work culture, that is your nucleus from day one, that's a complete different story than if you had a company of 5,000 employees and you wanna pivot overnight. Very different because the psychology of people who understand remote work, who've done remote work is very different than people who've never done it before and then are forced to switch or who want to switch. Very different psychology of these individuals. Number two, I think a lot of companies will also see long term, two years to five years out, the certain productivity within the sector of their company, not the company as a whole, but the verticals in the company will suffer. Lack of cohesion, lack of onboarding new talent and the fact that a lot of people psychologically aren't geared towards remote work because there's too many variables. One personal variable, they just need bosses, they need structure, number two family variable is like maybe they're, let's think about it, like you live in an 800 square foot condo and with your partner and maybe one child and you're gonna be working there 24 seven. I'm gonna lose my fucking shit for that. I'll go fucking bananas. And so where we're gonna head out to is, I believe is companies see the writing on the wall, they look at fiscal policies. They're gonna be like, okay, I'm gonna save millions of dollars a month on rent. I can allocate that money for R&D, allocate maybe for the shareholders. Number two, they also see opportunity now to do arbitrage more instead of geo-arbitrage, what I mean by geo, I mean outside your country, outside of the United States or Canada, like they do it right now, like the amount I can get amazing in my dev teams in Ukraine, my freelancers for graphic designs in Romania, I have amazing freelance writers in Taiwan, like majority of my company, let's say support is outside of Canada, majority, 95% of it. Great talent, great arbitrage opportunity. Okay, now companies are saying, well, I can get arbitrage nationally, not even internationally, where, hey, you wanna do remote work, no problem. Depending on where you live, like I said earlier, like whether it's like New York, let's say Miami, or like, I don't know, like some small town, like Jacksonville, Florida, or like Boise, Boise, Boise, right? You will get paid based on your geographical location. So you can't say that, well, I'm from Boise, and I demand a dev salary of $250,000 because that's what they pay in San Francisco. No, we will pay you what the Boise rate is, but in return, you can work for us, you don't have to come in, and same thing in like San Francisco, I think we're gonna see a lot of exodus though, people from San Francisco, that are willing to do the pay cut, because what's the point of getting paid $250,000 in San Francisco when it's $5,000 for a batch or a piece of shit? It's like, 70% of your fucking paycheck minimum goes towards your rent or mortgage. And so a lot of people like peace out San Fran, I'll go to LA or I'll go to somewhere else, anywhere but San Francisco or the Valley. And so it's gonna be interesting in that aspect. I think a lot of people will opt out, like, okay, I will take a small pay cut, I don't have to go through that shit, but the people that don't opt out, they choose to be inside the office because offices aren't disappearing, they're still gonna have it. I think that people that choose to be inside the offices and work Monday to Friday at the office, they will be promoted and they will have much more leverage over the people who choose remote. And it's not rocket science, it's very simple. You have so many different biases at play. You have the biasing of willingness, so persons who's willing to travel in as opposed to stay remote. So you have the biasing of recency. So this individual now that is seeing other human beings, his peers on a day-to-day basis. And the final recency, or the final biases, you have the bias of preference bias, where there is a preference with the recency bias because you build relationships with the people that you see on a day-to-day basis. I don't care how good you are at remote work, I don't care if you're the best developer. If you're not face-to-face and if you're not in the office, it's very, very hard to be politicking. It's very, very hard to get your promotion because there's no real connection. You're just some fucking face on the screen as opposed to me knowing you as a human being. And so I think it really does depend on the age of you where you are in your life, within your career. It depends on your financial burdens that you have or the overhead you have. But at least with this, it gives people option. I think before it was no option. I actually think in the long run, this is a benefit as opposed to a negative, but you have to realize there are consequences for every decision that you make. And if you decide to do remote work and you live in Jacksonville or Boise, get ready to get a pay cut, okay? And get ready not to be promoted to your liking because you're not in the fucking office every day with your peers. And I'll leave it at that, guys. If you have any comment and questions, leave a comment and question below and I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace out.