My connections in corporate are all being instructed to work from home less too.

The challenge of remote work is that a competent person capable of passing interviews can have 2 or more jobs simultaneously.

Remote jobs still seem healthy to me. I think you're more so noticing the hiring freezes for the lack of postings.

This is what worries me. Once employers catch on it's gonna mess it up for the people who need to work from home (older engineers who have kids and maybe health issues who are really benefitting from saving on the commute).

There is already a huge community of developers doing this : https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed

Being in an office is your "mutex lock". Once you remove that lock, you can have multiple jobs, unless you are based enough to work a second job from an office.

Personally I would not do it, but there are perverse incentives to do it and that is a predictor that people will do it.

If you do the job required in time, there is no reason this should be a problem for your manager. People can work remotely from the office as well. Just costing them time and money for nothing.

Yeah, agreed!

it's also generally illegal, but nobody is a lawyer here anyway

It is usually a breach of contract which results in at least, termination.

Which will lead to ultra high taxes in europe and is even legal in some(if you work both 100% without the other noticing). I don't see a problem, nearly noone would do that where I live, free time > money (at least knowing that the income from one ML job is probably quite enough).

You only pay taxes on your income so it is fine.

After 3 years of remote work I believe remote work is inferior to in-person work

I have noticed that too. Our company has asked the data science team to come to the office 2-3 times a week. We used to be fully remote since the pandemic.