Very interesting study, thank you Gitlab. It would be great if the results were true and the trend could prevail in the long term. I'm one of these 16% "working remotely all the time" since six years (working frequently remote for ten years before already). I have more than enough interesting work, but I regularly had to deal with companies that were not interested in cooperation because I was not willing to work at least 50% on site. I am curious to see if Corona will change this attitude. I live in german speaking Europe, and perhaps the culture here is simply not yet ready for it.
I'm located in Switzerland, do my own acquisition and I have long-standing, stable cooperations with companies where I am known and trusted. I also regularly receive requests from recruiters where I am in the database; this usually happens the same way; their clients (in Switzerland and Germany) are very interested until the moment they realize that I am not interested in working physically on site with them (in addition I appear too expensive for most German clients). This is not a problem for me because I am established and can afford it. But for the younger ones, who have to build their business relationships first, the aforementioned mentality of the clients makes it very difficult to work in this way. The argument that you work three to ten times as efficiently as any local employee in an open-plan office and that this makes the project cheaper, even though the hourly rate is higher (just to name a few advantages), is something that hardly anyone who doesn't know you wants to hear.
