We embrace technology for every stupid purpose imaginable, yet remote work facilitated by technology is generally viewed with disdain. It makes no sense, which is why remote work will continue to rise into the future. The dramatic centralization of our industry into a few locations also doesn't help with the crush of housing costs.
Putting a laptop on a cart, keeping it at just the right position relative to the whiteboard wall, and jotting down notes and diagrams for the guys on the other end, is frustrating. Repeating ~10% of the statements in a meeting because of audio issues is frustrating. There are a lot more technologies that need to be brought to market, or improved, in order to eliminate the drawbacks of remote work.
Right now, I find that working with the remote people is fine when there is some separation between our work, like an API, and it is excellent when I can get work to pay for me to travel. But debugging or pair programming over a call, where we can only share one screen, is just painful.
All of your points are 100% true. There are workarounds, but generally I think we need to embrace these challenges as perfect use cases for our own work as technologists.
If you were to project our current technical culture many years into the future, flying cars, free energy, clean water, etc., would we still have to herd ourselves into a central location every day so we can sit in a chair that is positioned next to a bunch of other people in order to accomplish the most basic communicative/collaborative tasks? With all that we've accomplished and all that we will accomplish, it seems to me that's not the way of the future, that's the way of the past.
TL;DR; It's not that remote work is easy, it's just that we smell of hypocrisy when we try to apply technology to every possible problem while rejecting it for our own.
Have you thought about working in a shared screen session for code editing, with a parallel chat client for interactivity. Voice is just too low SNR for code.
Shared screen session? Are you referring to GNU screen, and suggesting that we collaborate on some sort of mainframe setup? That sounds like a really interesting idea, like that crazy shared tabletop interface the Wayland guys have been promising.
Right now, my setup is: watch the loudest person's screenshare on my small screen (1080p) and do everything else on the main screen (4K). Git push to a WIP branch every few minutes. It makes for an interesting git history, for sure.
