People don't realize how quickly hardware iterates and how many modifications and changes are made on site in the lab.

Or just how often development hardware self-bricks and needs to be recovered.

Doing hardware work remotely is a lot slower. Possible, but slower.

Edit: Or how there is that one person who is really good at assembly and if you can walk down and ask them a question it'll save you a couple hours (days) of debugging.

And then there is that one person who is really good with an oscilloscope and while in theory you shouldn't need to have decode messages by sight from waveforms, well, this one person can and it sure is useful time to time....

This is not my experience. Driver developers don't use oscilloscopes. Changing HW once the first prototype is done is expensive and it takes a lot of time for you to get the second iteration. Or you flip a bit in the driver to disable the new broken feature. Most of the driver development happens before the physical hardware even exists. Everything is virtual.

> Changing HW once the first prototype is done is expensive and it takes a lot of time for you to get the second iteration.

Sure, but minor fixes soldered in place aren't uncommon.

My experience is with firmware for embedded and consumer electronics, maybe video cards are sufficiently complex that none of the things I saw are even possible!

Lots of issues resolving power states, clock trees, monitoring buses, docs from suppliers were always subtly wrong, power management chips never quite worked how they were supposed to, things like that.

You're right for prototype HW. For things that are "working" already it's usually not needed

I do happen to work writing low-level device drivers, and I do work remotely. The hardware engineers are always one click away from me. I can give them access to my machine with another click on the machine reservation system. It is very much possible and viable to have everything remote.