A WeWork Future: Perpetual Hybrid Work

I published my very first post on Interconnected in late February 2020. Back then, the coronavirus in China was in full swing, but the rest of the world has yet to grasp the gravity of this pandemic.

In that post, I talked about a future where remote work and remote consumption will become mainstream due to COVID-19. It was not an uncommon sentiment, especially if you work in tech. It was also a future that was mostly touted with an utopian sheen. Now that this future has largely become reality, it’s time to address some of the darker, more challenging elements of distributed remote work and the next phase of this evolution, which I call “perpetual hybrid work”.

Two years into this pandemic-turned-endemic, addressing these challenges is particularly timely given that multiple tech CEO’s have shared hiring data that validates the increasingly dispersed nature of technology and knowledge workers. This “perpetual hybrid work” future also bodes well for one specific company that has been the laughing stock of tech: WeWork.

For anyone who works in tech, especially if you are in charge of recruiting, hiring, and managing people, you have probably intuitively felt the physical dispersion of coworkers in the last two years. Last week, several CEOs voluntarily shared some numbers on Twitter that support this intuition. Here is the comparison of the percentages of hiring done outside the San Francisco/Silicon Valley, pre-pandemic versus the present day, among three top-tier tech companies:

Leave a Comment