Office Centricity is Over!

Rodolphe Dutel
2 min readJul 8, 2020

Slack, Shopify, Twitter… are now remote-first companies. Here’s why…

Several Silicon Valley giants are becoming to remote-first in the wake of COVID-19.

…have you ever heard this quote before:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” (Vladimir Lenin)

In 2020, Remote work adoption jumped a full decade ahead.

Here’s what happened and how it will change the way we work:

Unicorns are going remote

Up until now, no single remote company had more than 1,500 employees.

This just changed. Several billion-dollar businesses just announced they’ll offer permanent remote work:

Image source on LinkedIn

This sends an incredible signal to other Tech companies. Here’s Tobias Lütke, Shopify CEO (the most valuable company in Canada):

Enters Facebook..

On May 20, Facebook made an announcement:

“We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale” (Mark Zuckerberg)

Facebook’s goal is to have up to 50% of employees work from home within the next 5–10 years.

My sense is that Facebook is going remote because they don’t truly have a choice. COVID already has them working remotely and hiring in Silicon Valley hardly scales anymore, even with deep pockets.

Zuckerberg didn’t seem excited about remote. Facebook doesn’t have the square footage to bring people back to the office with social distancing.

He gets that remote will boost senior developer talent retention, that’s huge for him.

What’s next?

COVID has every knowledge worker “working from home” for the foreseeable future. Companies that do well financially want to keep operating well and hiring.

Tons of companies are embracing remote work as a new norm. They may keep their offices, those would probably be reworked, possibly downsized.

When Tech Unicorns start hiring remotely at scale, smaller companies will follow suit. Technology is good enough, COVID is here to stay, employees love the flexibility.

There will be adaptation changes, yet working remotely will be the new norm!

About Remotive.

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Remotive help tech employees land remote jobs, est. 2014.

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Rodolphe Dutel

Founder at @remotiveio | Prev. Director of Operations at @Buffer