Remote Work Is Fractured by Discipline - Not All Roles Are Treated Equally

The remote-work conversation usually collapses into ideology. Employees want freedom. Companies want control. Everyone argues about culture. But none of that explains what’s actually happening in the job market.

So instead of debating intent, we looked at structure. Using 37,369 active jobs currently indexed in JobsJudo, we analyzed how work arrangements break down by discipline (remote, hybrid, and on-site) to understand where remote work still functions as a default, where it survives as an exception, and where it is effectively gone.

The result isn’t a culture-war story. It’s an operational one.

The Market, by the Numbers

Across all disciplines analyzed:

• Remote: 11.4%
• Hybrid: 1.7%
• On-site: 86.9%

Hybrid, often framed as the great compromise, barely registers. This isn’t a gentle return to the office. It’s a hard reversion to physical operations, with a few structural carve-outs. But those carve-outs matter.

Where Remote Still Has a Foothold

Marketing (30.2% Remote)

Marketing stands alone. Nearly 1 in 3 marketing roles are remote: more than 2.5× the market average.

This isn’t accidental. Marketing work is digitally native, output-measured, and can be executed asynchronously. Remote works here because the work itself travels well. That doesn’t mean marketing jobs are plentiful - only that when companies do allow remote work, marketing is one of the first places they allow it.

Customer Success & Design (Low-20s to High-Teens)

Customer Success (21.9%) and Design (17.6%) form a second tier. These roles sit close to revenue or product and require collaboration, but not constant physical presence. Remote is possible - but increasingly selective for senior specialists and high-trust hires.

The Illusion of “Remote Tech”

This is where expectations collide with reality.

• Engineering: 11.0%
• Data: 10.5%
• Product: 13.9%

Despite the mythology, technical roles are no more remote than the market average. Engineering now skews heavily on-site.

Why? Because teams are being rebuilt locally. Companies want tighter feedback loops. Junior and mid-level hiring dominates volume. Remote is reserved for proven, high-leverage contributors. If you’re not exceptional, it’s no longer assumed.

Where Remote Is Functionally Dead

• Operations (7.4%)
• Finance (9.7%)
• HR (10.3%)
• Legal (15.6%)

These roles anchor organizations to compliance, process, and proximity. Even when the work could be remote, the risk tolerance isn’t. Operations, in particular, represents the floor: lowest remote percentage, highest on-site concentration. This isn’t policy. It’s necessity.

The Pattern That Matters

Remote work didn’t collapse evenly. It consolidated around roles that produce discrete outputs, can be measured without physical supervision, and scale asynchronously. Everything else reverted.

What This Means for Job Seekers

If you’re optimizing for remote work, discipline matters more than title. Seniority matters more than location. Output clarity matters more than experience breadth.

Blindly filtering for “remote” is no longer a strategy. It’s a gamble. JobsJudo exists because clarity beats volume; especially when the market tightens.