In my opinion, and without going into too much detail, I feel like the reluctance of hiring remote workers comes down to not wanting to put in the effort to kee

In my opinion, and without going into too much detail, I feel like the reluctance of hiring remote workers comes down to not wanting to put in the effort to keep up communication. I.E. the managers don't want to have to bother emailing and calling versus just walking up and talking. A lot of this comes from poor project management. I agree that a lot of the 'lack of engineers' is somewhat of a farce. If a company wanted to hire 20 people so bad they'd open a midwest office and hire 10 experienced people and 10 new grads from smaller universities and have the whole thing done in a couple months. Have people fly back and forth a couple times a year, get a couple good conference rooms with video conferencing and you're 90% as good as being there, just with a fraction of the cost. For what it's worth, I suspect there are better opportunities to work remote outside of the start up world, and outside of the technology focused business world in general. I work for a smaller consulting company and about 1/3-1/2 of the 100 or so people (and the bulk of the consultants and PMs) are remote. Other companies in our industry seem similar.