Return to office would cost me a country

I have worked remotely from two countries. Last summer I moved between them.

The work did not change. Everything else did - the tax system, the language, the price of groceries. My wife’s paperwork is still in progress. But the job came with me, and that is the only reason the move was possible at all.

The commute is the cheapest thing you lose

Every return-to-office thread counts the same list. Two hours a day in traffic. Fuel or a ticket. Bought lunches. Clothes you don’t otherwise need. Then someone says the two hours are unpaid labour, and over a year it turns into real money.

True. Also small. Annoying, not decisive. A raise covers it.

The commute is not what remote work gives you.

It gives you a variable

Remote does not delete geography. I found that out by moving - changing countries is heavy, and anyone calling it “work from anywhere” has not done the paperwork.

What it does is turn your location into something you decide.

That sounds abstract. Price it and it stops being abstract. Where you live sets your cost of living, your taxes, your healthcare, your kid’s school, what you can eventually buy, and which country your family lives in. For most people that decision belongs to whoever employs them. The desk is somewhere. You have to be near it.

Remote hands the decision back. Using it cost me a hard year. It was still the best financial move I have made - not because I earn much more, but because I picked where the money gets spent.

The permit decides how real that freedom is

Here is the part almost nobody writes about.

Remote work gives you the ability to live somewhere else. What you can actually do with it depends on a document, and the documents are not equal.

A permit tied to one employer. You can live there while you work there. Lose the job and the clock starts. The location is real but conditional.

An EU Blue Card. Higher salary and education bar to get one. In exchange: after about 18 months you can move to another EU country and apply there, and years accumulated in different EU countries count toward EU long-term residence. Family members can work without a separate permit - which matters more than it sounds, because a partner who can’t legally work is a household income cut in half.

Long-term or permanent residence. The location stops depending on a job at all. This is the one worth optimising for.

Citizenship. Done. No renewals, no conditions.

Two engineers can hold identical remote jobs and have completely different amounts of freedom, depending on which of those they have. The job is the income. The permit is whether the income can move.

I read a lot more immigration law than I expected to over the last few years. It is boring and it matters more than the salary negotiation.

The lever behind all of this

Outside the United States, the biggest financial lever an engineer has is not a raise. It is definitely not spending less.

It is the gap between where pay is set and where it gets spent. Cost of living where I am is about 40% of San Francisco. The code is the same code. An engineer with a US or UK remote role living in this part of Europe ends up with roughly one and a half to two times the purchasing power of someone doing identical work for a local employer.

I don’t have that yet. I’m paid local rates. Closing that gap is what I am working toward, and it exists only while companies will employ people who don’t live near them.

So an industry going back to the office is not a story about traffic. It is a ladder getting pulled up.

Arguing against myself

The office is worth something real. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

I learned a lot sitting near people better than me, hearing how they thought through a problem. I have not found a remote version that works as well. Onboarding is faster in a room. Some arguments take five minutes in person and three days in writing. Juniors are worse off remote and I don’t think that is seriously arguable.

But each of those is a specific problem. None of them has “five days a week in a building” as the cheapest fix. If juniors need proximity, fund proximity. If a team needs high-bandwidth time, fly it in a few times a year - far cheaper than a permanent lease in a capital city.

A blanket mandate fixes none of them precisely. What it does reliably is move a big cost off a budget line and onto the people least able to refuse.

Say what you’re asking

Wanting people in one city is legitimate. It is just not a small ask, and it should be named as what it is - a location requirement, priced like one. The move, the paperwork, the disruption to a partner who didn’t take the job, the year it takes to become a person somewhere new.

Ask it directly and some people say yes. I did, for my own reasons.

“We miss the energy in the office” is the same request with the invoice removed.

If your work required you to live in one specific place, what would you need in return - and has anyone ever actually asked you?