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A year ago, "where is this role based?" had an obvious answer: wherever your office is, give or take a commute. Now it's the most interesting question in hiring — and the answer is quietly changing what's possible for every company at once.
Once a job is remote, it's remote for everyone
This is the part that hasn't fully sunk in yet. When you let a role be done from anywhere, you don't just open your search to the whole map. You open your current team to everyone else's search, too. Your next senior developer can now be a thousand miles away. So can the offer that lands in your best engineer's inbox.
The map got redrawn, and it got redrawn in both directions.
The shortage looks different now
We've written for years about the senior-developer shortage — more demand than there are people to meet it, especially if you insisted everyone live near you. That last condition was always the self-inflicted part. The moment you stop requiring a developer to relocate to your city, the pool of people you can actually hire gets dramatically larger.
That's the opportunity. If you've spent years losing the local bidding war, the map just handed you a much bigger board to play on.
But everyone got the same map
Here's the catch: this didn't happen only for you. Every company that adapts to hiring anywhere is fishing in the same newly-opened water. The advantage doesn't go to whoever can hire remotely now — soon that will be everyone. It goes to whoever gets good at it first: the companies that already know how to evaluate, onboard, and actually work with someone they didn't meet in a conference room.
The ones still insisting on "local only, in the office" are now competing for talent with one hand tied behind their back, and some of them don't realize it yet.
What matters more now
When location stops being the constraint, the things that used to be secondary move to the front:
- Time-zone overlap. "Anywhere" is a big place. A developer whose workday actually overlaps yours is worth more than one twelve hours out of phase — we did the math on that a while back, and it matters more than ever now that anywhere is on the table.
- How well you work across distance. The remote-first habits everyone scrambled to learn this spring are now a competitive skill, not just a survival one.
- A real way to vet people you haven't met. When the candidate could be anywhere, "I had a good feeling in the room" stops being available. You need something better than a hunch.
Where this leaves you
The companies that win the next stretch of hiring won't be the ones with the biggest local talent pool — that stopped being the thing that matters. They'll be the ones who treat "where" as a variable and get genuinely good at working with great people wherever they are. The map is already redrawn. The only question left is how fast you learn to read it.