A) I think there's a lot of confounders here (like the global pandemic and such) that make it to difficult to infer anything from correlations

B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input

C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects

Many people end up doing remote work in person anyways at sufficiently large companies where in order to get things done they have to get on video call or phone.

The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.

There’s a big difference between working with other teams in other places and having your own team be remote. Most companies already had offsites and all hands and such before COVID.

Record earnings aren't entirely fake news (people are spending more time online post-pandemic, and that's not going to roll back even if things go fully "back to normal" [1]) but the stock appreciation has a lot to do with the fake-news-ification of the dollar. The CPI has always undercounted inflation, but now the divergence is worsening. Real inflation's probably 11-12% right now.

Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).

If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.

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[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.

Record earnings and stock prices are not necessarily due to remote work. They could be despite it.

I hate to be the "correlation is not necessarily causation" guy, but come on!

Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).

What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.

Hard to draw that conclusion when everyone was forced to go remote… they weren’t competing with non-remote companies.

I don't understand how you could think the rise in stock price is related to anything specific people at Google did vs massive spending increases by companies in google ads since it was one of the only ways to advertise with the lock-downs.

There may be a confounding factor or two there.