Suburbs can be, see suburbs built pre-WWII which typically had a train line connecting them to the nearby city industrial center which was used for daily commuting of workers who walked or biked to the station.
Conversely if you do attempt to do a deeper dive into the design and architecture choices my experience has been you end up getting push back and overruled -- because people are busy and don't want to miss a deadline with code that "works"/ passes whatever the minimum bar was set to hurl it into production.
I've been doing remote work for... 8-9 years or so now.
I'd say there are far _less_ phone calls as a remote employee than in office because there is an expectation in my remote employment that work is conducted asynchronously so Slack, E-mail, and written documentation is highly prioritized.
When I worked in-office stakeholders called me all the time, because they expected me to be at a desk and accessible by phone. It wasn't like they were going to come over from another floor or office complex just to talk with me. In remote, those kinds of phone where expected to be a Slack message or an e-mail.
These days, I pretty much expect 0 spontaneous phone calls in a work day. Phone calls are scheduled in advance, with agendas, plenty of time to plan out what I'm going to say. There's a high bar to pass to force everyone involved into a synchronous timeline and yank them out of whatever work they're in the middle of.
I guess my anecdotal experience with owning laptops from the early 2000s to today. An early 2000s laptop I expected to last between 18-24 months before it was shot. I don't think anyone made it through my college on the same laptop from Freshman year to graduation regardless of manufacturer.
Laptops in the last 10 years? All of those went at lest 4 years, and my 2014 MBP is still running fine. So it seems to me like things are improving.
Yes. Pretty much a club house, pub, community center whose membership consisted of veterans.
The suburb was built within a decade of the end of WWII and during the Korean war. So it was a safe bet that most households had a member who was a Veteran or related to a Veteran who could wave them in.
As time progressed, less and less households in the neighborhood would probably qualify. So its no longer a community centerpiece.
Pockets of commerce is the thing that is totally gone from suburbia.
I went back to the Cleveland suburbs for a grandparent's funeral several years back and I could definitely see how in the 1950s the structure of the suburb would've been great for the large Catholic families that lived there.
It was centred around the VFW, several parks, and a school. Children could play in the streets. Parents could socialize at the VFW and walk home. Each corner had a shopping complex with a grocery, gas station, barber etc. It was never more than 1/2 mile to all your commercial needs -- and a safe sidewalk walk if you sent kids to go get milk or eggs. If you were working downtown there was public transit to take you from the suburb to the city center and back again. I could see how this would be a very nice set up for where my parents grew up.
Today this doesn't exist. The corner shopping complexes are entirely vacant. Grocery is now only available at bigger box-stores requiring an hour of commuting in traffic on roads that don't have sidewalks. The school closed. The VFW is no longer culturally relevant.
As someone who does PHP back-end work every day --- the lack of enums is probably my #1 complaint with PHP as a language these days and I probably find myself wishing I had access to them at least once a week.
Where is my home office (I guess people are calling them "home labs" these days) going to be has probably always been my top concern since my first apartment and long before I started working from home. Having at least a dedicated room to set up my equipment and hack on side projects is always my top priority since that is where I'll be spending most of my free-time.*
* Granted since I work from home, I now really would like _two_ home offices so I can properly context switch between work work, and side projects. But I guess that is excessive.
Might I ask what line of work you're in that 100mb+ would be a limiting factor?
I ask because I've been doing remote work web development for 9 years now on a 10mb DSL line, and honestly haven't really seen much any need to go faster. Not at least work-related requirements.
Just because there's no public facing service sitting on a domain doesn't mean that domain isn't in use.
I have a domain whose only public facing service is just some picture I took. Am I using that domain? Yes, sure. It hosts all kinds of intranet services -- a few are whitelisted to other external IPs. Could I set up my own DNS on my network for those services and not own a public domain for them? Sure. But then I need to make sure anyone joining the network is first configured to use that DNS, instead of just joining the VPN and now the services all publicly available to you.
As far as Joe-public is concerned, I'm just squatting on that domain and not using it.
This was my experience. I'm seven years into remote working and I spent the first half absolutely fighting to force myself into a 9-5. I did all the habits that everyone typically recommends here. Separate office, machines. Get dressed in the morning. Keep regular hours.
I'm not a regular hours kind of guy. I want to put in a couple hours at 2 am. I want to sleep in. I'd like to go for a couple hour walk in the afternoon. Maybe chores or something personal was stressing me out that needed to be taken care.
Once I came to terms with just letting the two blend together, so much stressed came off my shoulders. Now, I'm available 9-5 on my cell if the team needs to chat -- but I get tickets cleared out when the I'm at peak motivation for that kind of work.
I'm far more productive then when I was trying to force myself to slog through unproductive afternoons. I got the hours in, but not the work. Now, I feel much more balanced between work and personal affairs.
I know several employers who hire remote, and it isn't a Bay Area thing -- they won't employ anyone in the state of the CA, for the same reasons they won't employ international employees -- they see CA legislation as too onerous to be bothered with dealing with when they can hire devs out of states with more lax employment laws.
Except when management finally wises up and realizes the product has no future... neither do you.
Much better to look around and find the product/project that is actually going to spawn revenue for the company and get on that team. When layoffs come, you've a much better chance of weathering the storm.*
* No guarantee that management won't do something stupid and lay off the golden egg under some stubborn belief the money sink will someday take off.
Didn't really go out in public much before the pandemic, other than a biweekly grocery run.
I can make a better meal, spiced to my particular tastes better than any restaurant. I have enough books, movies, and games at home to fill a lifetime with entertainment (not even counting the internet). Friends have been scattered to the wind for decades -- phone calls and messaging are sufficient.
The wilderness is still open, so my solo backcountry hiking has remained unchanged...
If anything, I've been taken by surprise to find that people find going into public a necessity for their mental health instead of a detriment.
I collect role-playing campaign settings for this very reason. I love just reading through long geographies of made up worlds. Pouring over the maps. Imagining the geopolitical landscapes or how the alternative histories or technologies might function in that world.
I don't actually play role-playing games at all anymore. But it's an entire genre of work (made up geographies, bestiaries, etc.) that isn't really served outside of games very much.
When I've seen a U.S. company "hire" an engineer outside of the country, they tend to end up having to do it as a contractor instead of as a FT Employee. When I see "Remote: Only US," there's a high chance they're not looking to hire on a contractor.
Reason being taxes and labor relations laws (PTO requirements, health insurance isn't going to extend to your country -- or really any of the benefits package).
I've been with remote employers who will go a step further and also restrict individual states (e.g. no California) or only hire in states where they have existing employees to reduce the load on HR.
They'll need to register in each State they've got employees. If they're taking on employees internationally, they might need to set up some kind of legal entity in that country. Which if it's a country like China, oh boy, that's a lot of paperwork.