It seems the market is changing - the supply/demand balance has been tipping in favor of employers, and it seems that many employers either (a) found that remote work on average was not an improvement for them or (b) are seeing "return to office" as a way to increase attrition without the bad PR of a layoff.

Personally, I'm not really in a position to move to a city with good tech jobs (due to partner/child situation) so even hybrid seems out of reach. Luckily I'm still gainfully employed in a remote role for a silicon valley company, but like many such companies it has limited runway and I'd like to make sure that if I need to, that a year from now I can land softly (I'd be sad to lose the tech, smart colleagues, career growth and pay).

I was already remote for a different employer before COVID hit, so I imagine that helps in demonstrating the ability to succeed remotely - but that was in a role for which I was hired on-site (I switched to remote after proving my worth). I'm a bit worried that finding a remote job "from scratch" (i.e. not having worked on site for the same employer first) will be difficult in the new environment.

I guess this is mainly a question for people who have worked remotely since long before COVID and who switched jobs frequently during that time: how do you find/land remote roles? Obviously you can apply to jobs that are marked remote, but I imagine that's not the only way (I think in the past those were not as common, and I think they currently attract a lot of competition). I can imagine that building an open source reputation and networking can help, are there other strategies I'm overlooking?