I know your point stands regardless, but you're replying to a guy who lived in a jeep for more than two years driving through 35 countries in Africa. I think he could cope with Costa Rican infrastructure. :)

How did it impact your productivity? Was there enough bandwidth to videochat with your coworkers, and if not do you feel like that had any downsides?

Actually it was 2 years from Alaska to Argentina and then 3 years around Africa.

Internet connectivity is MUCH better than you're thinking. 3G and 4G in every town big enough to have a gas station.

The wired internet was so fast in Nairobi and Cape Town I legitimately thought something was wrong. After living in the US, Canada and Australia I've never used internet even half that fast, it was mind bending.

I wonder if that might be because wired is still somewhat of a luxury compared to most that the ISP's aren't held back by the service they offer since there are so few utilizing the bandwidth.

I take it you've never been to Cape Town?

It's much, MUCH more developed than you're thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people in a very beautiful and modern city.

When I went to Cape Town the internet was awful. Super slow (at least for US/EU sites) and with very restrictive data caps (IIRC, 10GB per month). That was circa 2008 so perhaps things are better now

10GB a month? Jeez what were you doing? Streaming videos all day!?

Is that considered a lot, especially for home internet? I was busting 3-5x that a couple years ago on mobile data alone.

I was mostly joking but 10GB even in 2008 still isn't a lot. 300gb hard drives were pretty common. Although I bet you could've got a lot more out of that 10GB than you can now what with the absurd amount of ads and excessive bloat on websites nowadays.

2008 was 12 years ago, not a couple.

A lot has changed in 12 years

A wired internet connection plus a mobile network with enough bandwidth to tether is sufficiently redundant for the average software engineer. Maybe throw in a diesel generator/Tesla Powerwall if you're worried about power outages that last longer than your laptop's battery. If all three fail simultaneously, you probably have bigger problems than just internet connectivity.

how much reliability of an infrastructure does an an individual engineer need?

I suppose if you have reliable and reasonably-priced mobile data, then you can deal with any other infrastructure issues that arise. Laptops don't need perfect power uptime, and software engineers don't always need to shower.

But without that, at least the telecoms should probably be reliable.

What about companies that monitor you? Mine at least we have to ping it at a random time during the day and we're not told when we get pinged.

I'm just saying that as work from home becomes more common, it's only a matter of time before corporate starts measuring "output" now that they can't check up on you whenever. For programmers at least it's not so bad. For everybody else lower than management, I can only see people feeling unfairly shackled.

Sounds like a terrible micromangement