As a West Coast tech worker who relocated to the Midwest to work remotely, I certainly agree that the arrangement is an attractive, and ultimately mutually beneficial one. I have a slightly different take on a couple of points though:

> If this became the norm in the US I think this would do a lot for fixing the housing problems.

Ehhhh... It would allow a small subset of the tech/engineering population to relocate to places with better CoL ratios, but I think we're talking a tiny dent, if any, in housing affordability.

Other comments have touched on it, but to me the most pervasive problem is that housing/real-estate has been allowed to turn into an investment/asset-class first, and living space for human beings second. As long as interest rates stay low(and they have for a very long time to this point), real-estate presents a very attractive class of investment with a non-trivial chance of providing good returns. Couple that with the rise of the sharing economy and things like AirBNB, and the system very much favors those with access to ample, cheap credit(i.e. "the rich").

Take a look at some of the 2017-2018 lists of "best places to live" and "places with most constrained housing inventory"... I guarantee a lot of them aren't tech hubs, or even close to one. Anywhere considered "desirable" by a metric that people identify with will see an influx of money/investment, and one of the first places that will land is in real-estate. As a consequence, home prices skyrocket, and rents climb as well as newly minted landlords look to start making their money back.

That's why I don't think remote/telecommuting work will fix the housing problems except for those who are allowed to work remotely.

With regards to remote work:

> And those same employers could pay less for talent because they wouldn't have to give them a salary to afford places where the average starter home is over $1mm.

Please please please do not accept this as a necessary paradigm of remote work. The company is not doing you a favor. Your skills, in a modern global economy, are worth what they are worth. Trying to use some arbitrary gauge of CoL based on your geographic area to meter your pay is a laughably futile exercise when you consider the vast sums they save in commercial real estate costs and operating overhead if they implement WFH programs for even a few employees.

> And yet, we see articles in the NYT how big companies like IBM are already rescinding their offers for giving people more flexibility. We're not moving in the right direction.

I swear to god someone is paying a penny to pump that story on everyone's LinkedIn feed like once a week. I gotta be honest: I'm not breaking a sweat over the "death of remote work" when the headlining examples being cited are.... wait for it... IBM, Best Buy, and Yahoo. Give me a )#($(* break.

By virtually every metric relevant to a modern tech company, IBM is getting pantsed. They barely exist in some of the biggest growth verticals. They're still clinging to the same company model they ran 15 years ago. Claiming you're going to "drive innovation" by strong-arming a decent chunk of your workforce into either re-locating or quitting is thinly-veiled management speak for "we needed to let some people go, and this looks way better for us than calling it a 'layoff'."

Best Buy? I guess years of hyper-expansion and being an overpriced Amazon show room have finally caught up. Like so many retail outlets, building a store anywhere you can find a big enough field that's not either a flood plain or a toxic waste dump looked good on paper(and to shareholders) for a few years, but those chickens are starting to come home to roost. They spout the same noise about "driving innovation and collaboration", but again it's a threatened, suffering company with an opportunity to trim some head count.

Yahoo... well, better writers than I have penned eloquent prose to that vast empire of failure, so I'll spare my keys here.

I have found a lot of remote opportunities in the last few months, more-so than I did the last time I looked even a few months ago, so every indication to me(albeit anecdotal), is that remote work is growing, not dying.