That sounds like something inherent to the sort of candidates you hired, not remote employment in of itself. I can't imagine a remote employee having enough time to work for two different companies unless they have no requirements for being immediately available at any time (like meetings, or debrief after a deadline).

Edit: I'm not trying to attack you here. Just pointing out an alternative explanation. If you had hired better talent, they would have cost more, but you wouldn't have had them working at several different places.

To have a freelancer to put all his eggs in your basket takes some trust as well. I would actually prefer working for one client but if that client quits then poof everything's gone.

> And something like 20% of them outsourced part of the projects to developers in South Asia, security risk.

WTF. And no clue about that happening during standups?

How much time did you spend finalizing the decision on each of them? Maybe it wasn't quite enough.

It would be hard to find one or two really good software engineers that would like to use my particular stack and approach.

Also, were they clear that they were supposed to be working for one company instead of doing freelance work? The tough thing about freelance software development is that the pay is often less but the expected output is about the same as a normal employee. But with less pay and no job security, freelance developers may have to take on multiple projects just for practicality sake.

How do you not notice something like that happening on your end? So many of the problems cited by anti-remote bosses are not problems of remoteness at all. Sound like management was very checked-out.