People from more than 3/4 of all the countries in the world took classes at Stanford this quarter and none of them even knew if the professor was wearing pants

People from more than 3/4 of all the countries in the world took classes at Stanford this quarter and none of them even knew if the professor was wearing pants because everything was remote. Laptops have been around for decades. Video conferencing for several years, IM for decades, collaborative white boards and editing software. Bugtracking and version control are all on the web. What on earth is going on at these companies that they don't know about what is going on? Even hospitals are getting xrays evaluated overseas. There is a crucial observation in this particular portion of your post. Remote development forces you to streamline processes like "put everything into the bug tracker" and "diagram everything on the whiteboard". Having remote developers can actually force you to become a more streamlined and efficient company. You are right though, with Skype, bug trackers, and SaaS there is no valid reason why someone can not consider a remote candidate, save for some serious security concerns, like top secret classified information and systems.