What Percentage of Developers Work Remote or Hybrid?
Nick Kolakowski, Dice Insights
July 12, 2022
If you’re a technologist, chances are very good that your workplace offers either all-remote or hybrid work (i.e., the ability to work from home for a few days per week). For companies that insist on all workers coming into the office for the full workweek, this trend could make it more difficult to hire top talent.
The latest edition of Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Salary crunched data from 58,958 respondents worldwide and found that significant portions of technologists had either a fully remote or hybrid work option: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QbFVA/1/
“Smaller organizations are most likely to be in-person, with 20 percent of 2-19 employee organizations in-person,” the report added. “The largest organizations, with 10k employees, are most likely to be hybrid.”
Prominent tech companies such as Airbnb have leaned heavily into the idea of worker flexibility. On the flip side of that coin, you have companies like Tesla that insist all workers return to the office full-time. “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in a recent email reprinted by Electrik. “This is less than we ask of factory workers.”
For technologists everywhere, though, the trend toward remote and flexible work could translate into better pay, especially for those who don’t live and work in an enormous tech hub such as Silicon Valley or New York City. According to recent number-crunching by Protocol, remote work has indeed narrowed the traditional ‘geography gap’ in pay between those who work in those big tech hubs and those who do not.
“For senior software engineers, the pay gap between the most expensive U.S. cities and the least expensive shrank by two-thirds between 2019 and 2021, according to data from the compensation data provider Pave,” the publication wrote. “By the third quarter of last year, the gap between Tier 1 salaries and Tier 3 salaries had narrowed from 18.1 percent to just 5.9 percent.”
Whether or not that trend is sustainable remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, it’s clear that a majority of companies are giving their technologists a flexible work option of some sort—which is good news for anyone who wants to work from home for at least part of the week.