The Office Is Dead

Tech workers starting new jobs are going fully remote

Starting and building Spinach.io to reimagine how work gets done in the remote era, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking to people about the tectonic shifts in work we’re seeing since the pandemic started.

In the past 6 months, as the world is getting vaccinated and opening up and the job market is on fire, I’ve been seeing many friends and old colleagues in tech leaving their employers to start new jobs. The vast majority started fully remote positions either working at fully remote companies or companies that are based in other cities or states. I couldn’t reconcile this with some of the research I’ve been reading which suggest the majority of knowledge workers want to go back to the office either partially or fully. This study, for example, suggests 34% of employees want to work 3-5 days at the office while most people I talk to want to be fully remote and the ones interested in going back to the office want to do so 1-2 days a week. So I decided to do my own little research!

I searched Linkedin for senior full-stack engineers in 5 random markets* - Portland, Orlando, San Antonio, Charlotte and St. Louis and looked at the first 50 results. Of those, a whopping 38% started jobs at new companies in 2021 - the Great Resignation is real! I then took a deeper look at those who moved companies in 2021 and checked whether their new employer is local. I found that only 26% of them were. In other words - 74% started fully remote positions this year! While this may not be perfectly statistical and representative**, I believe it gives a good sense of where things are headed in tech - when looking for a new employer most just aren’t looking to go back to an office and prefer to optimize for better roles, companies or compensation. Whether employers like it or not - employees are voting with their feet and this is quickly leading to the end of the office era. RIP.

Have a great 2022 and don’t forget to subscribe!

*In bigger tech hubs, such as the bay area, many employees switching job move from one bay area company to another, though there was no way for me to know if they new job is fully remote or not, which is why I picked some smaller markets that aren’t major tech hubs.

**While the engineering population isn’t representative of the overall knowledge work population, it does have a big influence in the tech industry (there are over 4M software engineers in the US alone).