As the world learns how to work remotely, I'd love to share what I think will be the second, third, and possibly other order effects we'll likely encounter over the coming years. I believe these were always going to happen but our collective response to COVID-19 has simply accelerated each one. With that said, here we go...
/1
I think the 80/20 rule (80 in office and 20 remote) will flip dramatically in the next 12-18 months. We'll see highly concentrated wealth in specific geo-locations (i.e. SF) unlock and distribute across more cities all over the world. This is a good thing!
/2
Brain drain is a real issue and smaller towns across America will benefit from keeping incredible talent at home — always great to have high income wage earners with disposable income investing in local businesses...and paying taxes. We may see more tax friendly city/state optimization for specific careers.
/3
Pre-collegiate school quality will be forced to level up and ultimately be the metric that young families will use to determine where they want to live. It won't be a bunch of people moving to SF or NY as a default behavior.
/4
We will start to see another wave of technology hubs popup as a result. B and C cities are still homes for millions of people with loads of potential. Online learning will carry less of a stigma. Eventually there will be "trades" and possibly even unions.
/5
Programming classes will start at a younger age — exposure might hit the start of middle school. State colleges and universities will feel compelled to add technology courses and programs. More graduates from different walks of life = more diversity. This is a good thing!
/6
On the professional side, going to the office will be less about getting work done and more about building the company/team culture. In-person get togethers will be for play — not work.
/7
Many companies won't need traditional offices. Expect more flexible office leases (vs. ownership), sharing (splitting the asset), and even desk surfing. Big commercial investments should be re-zoned for work/living, increasing the supply and hopefully dropping housing costs.
/8
10-20 years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to see big tech companies outfit large apartment buildings. I'm weirded out about the thought of living in an apartment owned and operated by Google or FB. 😑
/9
Day-to-day work will change. Instead of "busy work" and "focused work", we'll transition to "single player work" and "multiplayer work."
/10
Single player work will be about HR, processing email, handling notifications, working through individual tasks and items.
/11
Multiplayer work will be about editing a document together (Google), working on a design together (Figma), programming together (Microsoft)...we're doing things with other people!
/12
Our focused and most valuable work product will come from multiplayer work. In order to do this, behaviors will have to change.
/13
Expecting everyone to be "on" at the same time is unreasonable. In a WFH world, people have families and personal responsibilities. I believe we'll see people compartmentalize and objectively STOP working 10+ hour days. Less is more. Less creates scarcity. Scarcity means less screwing around.
/14
Meeting agendas will become required. Automatic meeting note transcription and summaries will be the new normal. People will be weirded out by privacy. Someone who isn't Amazon or Google should go build this now.
/15
Calendaring will change significantly. Expecting a global team distributed across 3+ timezones will be impossible to coordinate. We'll need to get smarter about how we create tasks and divide work.
/16
We'll start to see some interesting multiplayer patterns. Examples: Alice will do A, Bob will do B, and Cumberbatch will compile the parts. Gosh, I miss Sherlock.
/17
We need better WFH tooling. Companies need to start issuing high quality hardware for home. If individuals don't have a desk, send them one. Standardized rigs are going to be important.
/18
Might be interesting to have an employee buy out their rig (desk, monitors, cabling) when they leave the company OR have the next company buy it out as part of the terms. Less waste is a good thing!
/19
There's a great window of opportunity for VR here. A lot of us are trapped in tiny apartments with families and pets. Having a place to escape to where we can virtually organize our "office" would be interesting. Lots of HCI patterns to work out though. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the big application of Facebook w/ Oculus.
Postscript, Summer 2026
I wrote the above as a thread three weeks into lockdown. It sat in a notes app for six years and nearly didn't survive the migration. I'm publishing it here at its original date, because the only honest place to leave a prediction is where you made it.
The scorecard:
- /14 was right. Automatic meeting transcription and summaries went from "somebody should build this" to a checkbox that ships inside every conferencing tool today. The privacy weirdness showed up right on schedule too.
- /9 held up and I still use it. Single player versus multiplayer is a better frame than busy versus focused, and it's how I think about where a team's real output comes from.
- /17 landed too. Company-issued home hardware went from a perk to a line item.
- /1 through /4 were right, then wrong. The geographic unlock happened fast and hard, and then return-to-office clawed a real portion of it back. I called the direction and badly missed the elasticity.
- /19 missed hard. I really thought the virtual office was the big Oculus application. Heck, Facebook rebranded as Meta and Apple launched the Vision Pro. The headsets got better and people still didn't want to hold a standup inside one. What actually changed knowledge work came from a completely different direction, and it wasn't a place you go...it was something that sits inside the work itself.
19 calls, 1 big miss, a bunch that landed, and a long tail of directionally-right-but-slower-than-I-thought. Not too bad!