I’m not surprised. Like everything else enabled by the internet, the short term gains from accessibility become long term inequality.
Remote work means employees are now competing with entire time zones rather than just the people in their locality.
It’s kind of shocking to me how quickly and fully people embraced it. Hate your 1hr commute? It’s a moat against your competition with a 2 hour commute.
My own experience at the end of last year was my first job search in the remote era. In the past, I'd look for local jobs in my East Coast City and see a handful that felt like a good match. When I applied to those, I was one of a small number of candidates, and since I generally chose things that felt like a really good match, a job offer came far more often than not, and would rarely get no response.
Fast forward to this past cycle and high availability of remote work, and there were literally dozens of jobs per week that felt like near-perfect matches. For those that I applied to, I was one of 40-200+ applicants for the role. Of the 50 or so jobs I applied to directly w/out a prior recruiter contacting me, I had 10 intro chats, 3 interviews going to the final round, and one job offer. About half of the result resulted in rejections ranging from immediately to a few months later, and the rest simply had no reply.
There were some weird experiences. About a month after I started a new job, I heard back from 3 interesting roles on the same day, over 90 days after my initial application. In another, the interviewer was super communicative and responsive, and had me take a personality quiz after intro calls with them and the hiring manager. Apparently I failed, because I was totally ghosted after that.
Here in the UK I find working from home more comfortable, but there are pros and cons to both WFH and offices. But I get about 3-4 hours back per-day that I would have spent on a train. I also save money on transport and lunches in London. Finally I'm able to work for companies across the country rather than everything being focused in London which is evening the playing field.
Personally I don't mind working remote or onsite, but what I'm noticing is much more competition for remote roles. I live in Munich which has a tech sector, and isn't LCOL, but isn't a hub the way Berlin or Amsterdam is.
Onsite / hybrid roles in my area get 10-20 applications in the first day, while remote roles often get 150-200. This is for regular everyday startups and companies, not FAANG which I expect gets much more interest.
There are also fewer available remote roles to apply to. So I would say yes, if you have to be remote because of your location I expect it is more challenging. Companies (at least here) have more leverage at the moment, and the majority have not fully embraced remote, while at the same time remote jobs are the most desirable ones.
It is more challenging, but not as much as it was before the pandemic started. 5 years ago less than 1% of the companies were offering 100% remote positions. Nowadays I can say that, at least from my point of view, I find that at least 30% of the companies out there offer 100% remote positions. I think this number is going up as well (as well as hybrid, though).
Thankfully, 100% office work is less and less common.
Nevertheless the biggest advantage is (as usual): your skills. If you ace the interview, companies in general will want to hire you no matter what.
At least 70% of mid/senior jobs are full remote in my country, or at least advertised at such (based on my data of ~30k job adverts). It's a developing country so salaries do not match US salaries by a large margin, but those are the facts, and I haven't really heard of anybody being forced to work from the office in my environment (although naturally I think that such stuff happens).
Just starting to bootstrap a startup and I would not hire from the Bay Area for all but save the founding engineers where its critical we get someone in who has depth of experience and can quickly become a tech lead at staff level. The salaries are just to high.
Instead I will pull from the brilliant pool of engineers from South America and Europe and areas like the mid-west etc. We will do a lot of work in OSS, so running an asynchronous / non-linear workday full time remote team works just great.
I would really not like being limited to hiring in small geographical area.
If you plan to practice the "salary arbitrage" mentioned above, it needs to be a good deal for the employer. If you can provide the same amount of value as someone in the Bay Area at 20% discount it is a good deal for both parties.
I was working remote before COVID. I'm not based in USA. Remote has given me opportunity to work with people that for sure would never come to my home country.
I've lived in a LCOL my entire life and really made actual development money by going remote. I've done it for so long and the wage disparity is so great I will likely have to leave the industry if remote dries up. Owning a home does not permit me to move around the country and I'm not going to do staff level engineering for under $150k (and that's the lowest I'd ever go). Far easier to just go work somewhere else in a different field because at least then I'd be starting from the bottom with no memory of the past.
Remote work seems to be more difficult to get these days with all of the applications coming from people thinking it's an easy meal ticket. I've gotten most of my jobs through my network. Who knows how long that'll last. Pair this with the general apathy of doing coding interviews and other song-and-dance nonsense to get a job and this current job I have may be my last in the industry anyway. When skills are not valued over CS brain teasers the shark has been jumped.