I wonder whether things will ever really go back to the way they were. Right several things are happening in parallel.
One thing is the race for a vaccine. Yet we know that the fastest development of a vaccine in history was for mumps, and that took four years. So it might be a while before we can stop social distancing.
But another thing is our gradual adjustment to life with social distancing. We are developing new technologies, social customs, business practices, in a massive and highly parallel effort just to deal with this new reality.
At some point, the results of all this might lead to a permanent shift in the way things are done. Entire industries may simply vanish, and entirely new industries will arise, tabula rasa, to take their place.
We might be seeing the beginning of a new era in human history. In a few years we might just take it for granted that everybody works from home.
I sincerely hope so.
In some ways, nothing has to change permanently – the virus will eventually recede, and we can go back to normal. In other ways, I can’t see how something so vast, and so global, can possibly just fade to memory.
I suspect that those of us who work largely alone or in small teams (and particularly developers) will be the last to go back into the office; office space priority will go to those who need to meet in person. On the back of a year or more of working from home, I suspect companies will be much more willing to let people do so.
If you were a company about to make a software buy vs build decision, presumably this would bias you heavily toward buy – you are much less likely to have spare desk space now, and the space you’d need to acquire would be larger.
Office space now has a lower value per unit area, and a higher cost per employee. That will put a downward pressure on prices, but at a time when everyone needs more space, which should push prices up. That should mean an expansion of offices into cheaper areas; it’s the only way to meet those two things. Faced with either moving their office to a worse location, splitting sites or just letting people work from home, there has to be a good motivation for a lot of companies just accept WFH is here to stay.
Once a significant fraction of companies accept WFH for a given job title, it will be much easier for people with that job to expect to work from home; so then there will be higher employment costs as well as office space costs.
I have a friend who works in corporate collaboration software, whose company has seen massive demand recently – that may be one of the things which will rise; presumably someone will appear who can do it far better than creaking monsters like Sharepoint.
All of this benefits people who need flexible working – parents, people who are disabled or unable to leave home, people who are carers; so this should be a boost to gender equality.