I think there will end up being two classes of employee: one who is full time remote and one who is part time in the office. Full time remote has zero chance of advancement. The only way to move up will be to take a new job, and that one may not be remote. The one who's in the office can get promotions because their bosses know them and will see them as a team player. My company says we'll do part time in the office, and an informal "in the office at least once a week" was mentioned. I know what it means: you can be in once a week and only once, but you better be looking for a new job because your career here is done. Not that they'll be forced out, just raises will be smaller and promotions won't happen. For those full time remote the optimistic view is that nobody is forced out but pay stagnates and new hires come on at pay competitive in an abandoned coal mining town.
I think there will be two classes of employee: those at small firms where their individual skills are valued and their quirks humored, and those at large firms where they will be ground into fucking fertilizer. I guarantee you that your vision of the future will appear to be true. This is because local HR flaks will be given authority to binge and purge. These local HR flaks will, of course, be binged and purged by the HR flaks above them. It will fundamentally come down to eliminating as much unpredictability as possible from the work environment. Given that, is the contract mercenary living in a van really the one suffering the most? Emily Guendelsberger highlighted some Amazon warehouse employees she worked with who were totally, 100% there for the seasonal grind because they were saving up to go hostel-hop in Cambodia. We traditionally presume this sort of behavior is youthful indiscretion and a sign of low ambition but fuckin' hell, man, that's all there's been for an entire generation of Americans. I mean, Amazon knows this. You're 5% vested after a year, 20% vested after two, but 60% vested after three. So Amazon makes the first two years absolute shit for you. This is one reason nobody humors techbros bitching about rent - they're fuckin' farts in the wind after eighteen months anyway so really, they should STFU and go get a better job now but Amazon is too busy carrot-dangling for them to notice that they're the marks. I think the pandemic taught a lot of people a lot of things. First and foremost, it's not worth it. So what we've got right now is a whole bunch of industries that have cut themselves to the bone so they can maximize profits and by "themselves" I mean "their employees" and God snapped her fingers and went wakeup And those companies who are now looking at paying 20% 30% 40% higher wages in order to complete their contracts? Yeah they're FUKT. But they were fucked a long time ago. They were fucked when NAFTA happened. The asbestos doesn't come for your lungs now it waits. I mean yeah. A whole lotta shit is getting automated away. Fer sure. But I think we're looking at a labor crunch before that. And I mean look. Who knew? $12T of socialism pays for itself three years quicker than $7T worth of "business incentives!" Gonna be a wild ride. Dunno what it looks like but I know my kid is gonna grow up in a very different country than I did.
