Return to Remote

I love remote work, and I think we will see a resurgence of remote positions in 2026. Here’s why.

Caveat

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This is for the European job market, not America (or elsewhere) as I work in Europe.

Job market is recovering

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Anecdotally I can tell you the market is recovering. I’ve had 6 recruiters reach out to me directly this week – and two even bothered to proactively screen out the non remote positions when pinging me.

I currently work in a fully remote team of contractors, and most of us are getting 3+ pings a week now. This experience is the norm, as of about mid February ‘26, at least for DevOps / Cloud specialists that have 8+ years under their belt.

Also, as a classically leading indicator, take a look at the recovery of HR and recruitment roles across Europe:

This data doesn’t capture 26Q1 yet, but you can see the trend.

Gas gas gas

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For better or worse, oil and gas are going to become much more expensive due to the… war, er special military operation, that is… I mean; the complete and ongoing victory in Iran and the surrounding nations. Yeah.

I’m not going to get political in this article, but suffice to say that people smarter than me don’t see an easy road out of this for Europe and the world more generally¹. Which means the price of oil and gas (and helium, and fertilizer, and …) are going to be substantially higher for the foreseeable future.

This is impacting Asia right now, which had already started to prepare for the oil and gas crisis: mandating work from home for government employees (in Thailand), and moving to virtual meetings unless in-person is explicitly required or even testing out a “4 day work week” in the Philippines – see the reg’s excellent article on the topic.

Moreover, Asian leaders are now considering a return to the pandemic playbook, enforcing work from home measures to conserve fuel².

We’re not even 30 days into what will probably be a crisis for the rest of this year at least.

Europe will fair slightly better, but we’re going to be in the same boat when the strategic reserves run dry. At least in Ireland, the prices are already going up quite badly³ – and we haven’t even entered the crisis proper yet!

Ergo

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A recovering jobs market and spiking energy costs combined are going to incentivize both companies and employees to find ways to avoid the increased energy costs… which has a pretty simple and recently globally tested solution in the IT market: work from home.

(as a side benefit you also help our ecology by burning less fossil fuels!)

So do your part to help our economy, keep the world habitable, and save some €€€:

• Start working (or hiring) remotely today!