Remote Work Doesn’t Guarantee Job Security Anymore

For a while, working from home felt like a career insurance policy. You could skip the commute, control your environment, and still deliver — all while building a life that didn’t revolve around an office. But the ground has shifted in ways that have nothing to do with productivity or focus. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that unemployment among college graduates under 29 rose from 3.1% to 3.7% over the past several years, while older graduates actually saw their rate drop slightly. Remote work accounts for up to 64% of that divergence.

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The Hiring Math Has Shifted Under Remote Work

The standard story about remote work has always been that it’s good for workers. More flexibility, less burnout, no commute. And for a lot of people, that’s still true. But the story was never just about individual experience — it was also about what employers are willing to do when they can’t see their team in person.

That turns out to be a different calculation than most of us expected. A working paper from researchers at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford scanned hundreds of millions of hiring records and job postings across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia between 2017 and 2025. What they found was striking: entry-level hiring dropped 29% over that period, while senior-level hiring increased by more than 5%. Junior-level hiring fell by nearly 26%.

The decline started around 2022, just before the widespread public release of generative AI tools — which matters, because it means the timing doesn’t line up neatly with the technology everyone wants to blame.

What the data actually shows: companies that adopted remote or hybrid work arrangements shifted their hiring toward experienced people. The logic is straightforward — managing and mentoring a junior employee from a distance takes more time and effort than most organizations are willing to invest. When you can’t walk over to someone’s desk, answer a quick question, or check in casually, the cost of developing new talent goes up. So employers hire people who already know the ropes.

This isn’t a small blip. It’s a structural change in how companies staff their teams. And if you’re early in your career — or thinking about making a pivot into a new field — that shift directly affects your job security, whether you realize it or not.

Who Gets Hired — and Who Doesn’t

The age breakdown makes the pattern even harder to ignore. The New York Fed researchers compared unemployment rates for college graduates under 29 with those over 29, and split the data by whether the occupation could be done remotely. In jobs that require physical presence — nursing, for example — the unemployment gap between younger and older workers spiked briefly in 2020 and then returned to normal. In remote-eligible fields like software engineering and financial analysis, the gap never closed.

Unemployment among young college graduates in remotable jobs rose nearly a full percentage point between the 2017–2019 period and 2022–2024. Among older graduates in those same fields, it fell slightly. The gap isn’t about the economy overall — it’s specifically about which jobs can be done from home and who companies are willing to hire for those jobs.

One of the clearest illustrations comes from a Fortune 500 tech company studied by University of Virginia economist Emma Harrington. Before the pandemic, software engineers at this company got about 20% more feedback on their coding work when they sat near colleagues — even then. When the company went remote, feedback across the board dropped, and the people hit hardest were the youngest engineers with the most to learn. During the remote period, the company shifted its hiring toward workers about a decade older on average. When it later adopted an aggressive return-to-office policy, it started hiring new graduates again.

The message from the data is hard to miss: employers are willing to invest in junior talent when proximity makes that investment easier. When it doesn’t, they hire experienced people instead. If you’re early in your career and working remotely, that puts you in a tougher spot than your in-person peers — through no fault of your own.

What can you do about it right now? If you’re job hunting, ask directly about how the company handles mentorship and training for remote or hybrid staff. If you’re already in a role, consider negotiating for intentional in-person time — even if it’s a few days a month. Something like: “I want to make sure I’m learning from the team effectively. Would it be possible to be in the office a few days a week for the first year or so to get up to speed?” It’s a reasonable request, and it signals that you understand how the system works.

The Feedback That Used to Happen Naturally

The reason companies are hiring fewer junior workers for remote roles isn’t mysterious — it’s that teaching someone from a distance is genuinely harder. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study on the same Fortune 500 tech company and found that software engineers received 18.3% more feedback on their code when they were in the same physical location as their colleagues. They also asked more follow-up questions and were more likely to leave for better opportunities — because they had a clearer sense of their own growth trajectory.

That 18% difference in feedback might not sound enormous, but compound it over a year or two of early career development and the gap in skills, confidence, and professional network becomes significant. The researchers described this as “the power of proximity” — the informal, low-effort exchanges that happen naturally in a shared space and are nearly impossible to replicate through scheduled Zoom calls or Slack messages.

This is where the job security angle gets personal. It’s not just about getting hired. It’s about whether you’re actually building the skills and relationships that make you valuable enough to keep — or to move up. If remote work quietly slows down your professional development, your job becomes less secure even if your employment status hasn’t changed yet.

Some companies are getting better at this. They’re setting up structured mentorship programs, rotating junior staff through different teams, and protecting time for feedback rather than treating it as optional. But those practices are still the exception, not the norm. If you’re in a remote role and the feedback is sparse, that’s a warning sign worth paying attention to — not because you’re failing, but because the system isn’t set up for you to succeed.

What Job Security Looks Like Now

Pew Research found that 75% of U.S. employees whose jobs can be done from home do work remotely at least some of the time. That’s a huge share of the workforce. And among those remote-capable employees, 46% say they would be unlikely to stay with their employer if the option to work from home were taken away.

That tells you how much people value the flexibility. But it also reveals a vulnerability: if you’re counting on remote work as your main reason to stay — or as your main negotiating lever — you’re betting on a preference that employers have less reason to accommodate than they did two years ago. The labor market has cooled. Job openings have shrunk. The leverage that workers had in 2021 and 2022, when companies were desperate to hire and remote work was a key perk, has largely evaporated.

What does that mean for your actual job security? A few things worth doing:

• Build relationships that aren’t tied to your current job. The people who know your work and can vouch for you are your real safety net — not your employment contract.
• Make your work visible. In an office, visibility happens by default. Remote, you have to be more deliberate about sharing progress, asking good questions, and documenting what you contribute.
• Know what your company values. If the organization is pushing for more in-person time, and you’re holding out for full remote, understand that you may be trading short-term convenience for long-term standing. That’s not an argument against remote work — it’s an argument for making the trade-off consciously rather than by default.

There’s also a longer view that matters here. The New York Fed researchers pointed out that early-career experiences have lasting consequences: people who start their job search in a weak labor market tend to have lower earnings and slower career progression for years afterward, compared to peers who start in better conditions. That doesn’t mean you’re stuck. But it does mean that the choices you make now about where to work and how to position yourself can compound in ways that are hard to undo later.

If you’re early in your career, one practical move is to look for companies that are explicit about investing in junior talent — structured onboarding, regular feedback cycles, mentorship programs, and a willingness to bring people into the office for dedicated learning time. That might mean accepting a hybrid arrangement even if you’d prefer fully remote. Nick Bloom, the Stanford economist who has studied remote work extensively, advises students to go into the office at least three days a week for the first five years of their career. Not because the office is inherently better, but because the learning and networking that happen there are still hard to replicate from home.

AI Is the Easy Scapegoat, but Look Closer

It would be convenient to blame this whole shift on artificial intelligence. The story writes itself: AI is automating entry-level tasks, so companies don’t need junior workers anymore. And there are studies that point in that direction — the Stanford Digital Economy Lab found that employment among early-career workers in AI-exposed occupations dropped 16% since ChatGPT launched in 2022.

But the more recent and more carefully controlled research tells a different story. When the LSE/Oxford researchers analyzed AI exposure and remote work together — controlling for each other — the AI effect “attenuates sharply and is often statistically indistinguishable from zero,” in their words. Remote work remained a strong, consistent predictor of declining junior hiring. AI did not.

Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, put it bluntly: there’s zero evidence of job losses from AI so far. Employment data is steady. If anything, AI adoption may increase demand for engineers and AI specialists. The remote work factor, by contrast, has a much stronger economic footprint in the hiring data.

That doesn’t mean AI won’t reshape the labor market eventually. It probably will. But the shifts we’re seeing right now — the decline in entry-level hiring, the preference for experienced workers, the growing unemployment gap for young graduates — are being driven by something more mundane and more structural: the difficulty of building a career from a distance.

The practical takeaway isn’t that remote work is bad. It’s that remote work doesn’t automatically include the infrastructure for career development, and pretending it does leaves you exposed. If your job is remote, ask yourself whether your employer has actually solved for mentorship, feedback, and visibility — or whether they’ve just assumed those things would happen organically. The data suggests they usually don’t.