Indeedy Vecchio.

Anyway my man I'll off for a few drinks.....Happy New Year to you and all of Hol.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

If you can work from home full time and your boss is happy with that what's to stop your job being done in India or Thailand?

Unfortunately some employees are playing into the hands of their bosses.

One more point

Absolutely nothing. Unfortunately the majority of jobs simply don’t work as well or at all, remotely.

Siloed, implementational digital work that requires little creativity or teamwork beyond the odd check in here and there, absolutely.

The majority of roles? Nope. I know of a few people directly and indirectly that are already regretting their knee jerk moves, and not all because of their company policy.

It should also be up to the company to decide whether your role is suited, long term, to isolated working. The last year has been a brilliant experiment to test out long held theories about remote working - and the results are in and in some industries they’re not particularly favourable.

Blended working, fine. Full time remote? In most instances. No. Sub optimal

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

The bits in bold were what I was imagining to be the case.
I think a fair few employees have sucked-up the 'working from home' thing and probably milked it a bit- as human nature does.
It does however, make their role just a tad vulnerable. Some remote tasks could very well be undertaken by someone in a poorer economy. And although they probably couldn't take over the role completely, it would leave the employee open to potential redundancy and then to be re-hired on a reduced spec' contract with reduced pay.
The 'gig' economy, so vaunted by those in power, for those in menial jobs, may well be sneaking up the management ladder.

I disengage, I turn the page.

I lost my job to India back in 2002 ironically my job was to move the department from London to India so this turkey voted for Christmas.

Siloed is the correct description. Most people who do skilled office work will tell you it's impossible for those guys in India to do their job as they might be bright but don't have the experience or skill sets. Actually this is not true or how we did the move.

I worked in a department of 200 staff involved in Trade Finance, the staff would tell you it is quasi legal and you need to understand shipping and transport and UK and internal laws (UCP).

Actually not true when you break a people's job's down it mainly involves a lot grunt work and a small portion of technical expertise. The grunt work can be automated or farmed out to a cheap outsourcing company which leaves the technical knowledge.

We had one bloke in the department who had a lawyer's like technical knowledge, he is was also a mean drunk in the office and should have been sacked. However he had a job for life the rest of us were expendable he out of the 200 people was irreplaceable.

This was 20 years ago and I am out of touch but my guess is it still hold true you ship the grunt work to Asia just leaving the really technical stuff in London.

So the challenge is to redesign the work flow so that the grunt work goes to Asia whilst the small difficult stuff goes to the handful of real experts. In other words you dumb the jobs down.

Now of course this might impact productivity slightly as 1 knowledgeable person can do 100% of the job whilst a bright Asian may only be able to do 80%. However the employer doesn't care as he is saving a fortune on salaries and premises taxes etc.

I think a lot of people are in for a shock over the next few years because as SW19 has pointed out they have demonstrated to the boss their job can be done anywhere in the world.

Storm's a coming.

One more point

Funny you should say that. I grew up on a council estate just about every bloke could turn his hand to the usual odd jobs painting bit of woodwork change a washer etc however that was in the sixties.

Today most of us can't change a light bulb so we get a little man in. You made the right call the growth area is for people who have trades and better yet an odd job man. That is where the money and job security is, any kid who is good with his hands get into that, office work is no longer a job for life.

One more point