Just going to say it, even though it's not a popular opinion these days. āFully remoteā is not going to make these companies more competitive (on the contrary). Yes you can attract people from all over the world, but competition for great talent is equally hard.
Here are some of the problems with a fully remote setup:
1. Body language and in-person contact are critical for building trust and high bandwidth communication. And innovation requires high trust and high bandwidth communication.
2. People are social creatures and need human interactions. Yes you can have your social friend outside work, but where do you build such relationship? Correct at school, at work, etc. For engineers this is even more true, we need these relations.
3. Junior people needs to learn from senior people⦠that's extremely hard in a fully remote setup. Being a great engineer means you need to understand and learn other parts of the business too (Sales, Finance, Customer Success, Support, HR, etc.). This is much harder in a fully remote setup.
4. Professional conflict's are healthy, but in a remote first environment such conflicts quickly escalate to unhealthy personal conflicts. Mangers and especially manger of mangers have very little way to catch such conflicts in their infancy, and even less room for solving them informally (at the watercooler).
5. When such conflicts occurs it's easy to change job (same work place different company). I foresee that fully remote companies will have lower retention of people.
6. Even though you can recruit all over the world, do not underestimate the problem with time zones, or having to setup legal entities in many countries.