Impact of Remote Work on Employment
Now that most of IT is working from home, how does that impact employment opportunities?
There are talented people across the world. Pre-lockdown, I got into a back and forth on Twitter about the value of location on employment. As someone who lives in a major city, I know the advantage of location. I can get a premium salary for a high demand skillset based on the limited geographic supply. The same individual in St. Louis, MO may not be able to demand the same salary due to the lack of demand in that region.
My argument is and was that this is the basics of economic supply and demand. Let’s not get back into the details of that conversation. The current reality has disrupted the balance. VMware recently announced that all of their 33,000 employees may continue to work from home even after the pandemic induced work from home policy ends.
What does this mean for the future of work? High-level thinking, there are four thoughts.
More diverse candidates
Disruption of the salary scale (think hiring a St. Louis-based employee for a San Francisco based company)
More competition for the same jobs
The ability to work from anywhere and therefore, the escalated globalization of the workforce
I joined some fellow analysts as we recapped AWS re:Invent. One of the topics was the impact of the public cloud on remote work. I took the opportunity to talk about the impact on employment. It’s a worthwhile watch. Thanks to Sarbjeet for having me on.