There is no doubt that remote work is here to stay.
The tools we have at our fingertips today to conduct business and work are not just impressive but liberating. No matter what kind of job you do on a computer, there is a good chance you can use a piece of software that allows you to work with people all around the world. You can connect with professionals across the globe, put your skills to use, and turn your ideas into reality.
The old corporate world is going to struggle in the coming years to justify its outdated ways of working. In the midst of the AI boom with the rise of LLMs and the new technologies built around them the way we work is about to change tenfold.
But what exactly are the benefits?
The benefits are plenty and well documented. In a landmark randomized controlled trial published in the *Quarterly Journal of Economics*, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom assigned call center employees to work from home four days a week while their peers stayed in the office. The remote workers completed 13.5% more calls more output, not less, from the people who had left the building. The lesson is clear for any role where the work can be measured: the office was never the source of the productivity. The work was.
For software development specifically, the evidence is just as telling. When the pandemic emptied offices overnight, researchers analyzed activity across every GitHub project open source and corporate alike and found that developer output, measured by pushes, pull requests, code reviews, and commented issues, held steady or slightly increased compared to the year before. The code kept shipping. And GitHub itself had figured this out long before the rest of the world was forced to: built on open-source, async-by-default workflows, the company treated remote work not as a concession but as a core part of its culture. The very tools developers use to build software turned out to be the same tools that make remote work effortless.
Numerous studies echo this people who work hybrid or remotely are as competitive and productive as their counterparts working full office hours. But that is just one part of the conversation. There are numerous other benefits economic, environmental, work-life balance, reduced commuting, and lower costs and in an economy where everyone is struggling, these are important factors that job seekers and employers alike must consider.
The thing is, even if you work in an office, you are probably already working remotely. This is especially true in European countries (and not only there), where some of the biggest US tech giants outsource their work.
The biggest benefit of all one that most companies are missing is the talent pool you gain by recruiting globally. If you are a technology company and not hiring remotely, you are probably missing out on a great deal.
Now, there are of course some benefits to in-office work, such as social interaction. But corporate culture is well known for its toxicity, and those interactions quickly become unbearable daily chores hidden behind fake smiles.
The future of technology companies is, without doubt, remote. The tools we will have ten years from now will be nothing like what we have today.
This is what remote work really unlocks: not just comfort or saved commutes, but a fundamental break from the accident of geography. For most of history, your career was capped by where you happened to be born. A brilliant engineer in Lagos or Kraków or Manila was invisible to a company that only hired within driving distance of its headquarters. Remote work dissolves that boundary. It lets the best idea win regardless of postcode, and lets the best people find each other regardless of borders. That is not a perk. That is meritocracy in its truest form and the companies that embrace it will build things the office-bound simply cannot.
A company's goal should lie in meritocracy, where the best people around the world gather to build the best products and drive technological progress forward.