I strongly disagree about connectivity being inherently required by software development and therefore an implied part of the job. To take it a step further I believe most developers would benefit from being offline some parts of the day, unless some exceptional circumstances make that unproductive.

That’s ridiculous, you’re conflating productivity (due to slack and meetings, I assume) with fast internet access.

You need to install potentially large packages and images, commit code, and be clear in meetings - that’s a minimal standard for software and if someone can’t do that because they’re on some crazy kbps internet then they’re not suitable for the job.

I live in a country with fast enough 5MB/s and huge ping (300ms+) internet. There is no problem with installing packages, downloading deps and so on, but realtime remote typing or gaming could be really clunky.

Don't forget that you don't need a fast ping for development (with local env). "Good internet" is a very broad definition.

No one can guarantee that, at most a remote worker can pick the one (or two if they are lucky) ISPs available to them. Anything beyond that is out of their control.

I have been working fully remote for years from a rural location. My only connection to the Internet is LTE and while it's decent most of the time, there are some days where it's pretty bad.

Luckily my dev environment is local first, which means that a few hours of high packet loss doesn't prevent me from being productive.

Remote Async means not everybody has a good connection 24/7. Not every position requires being online immediately if it’s not prescheduled. Picture someone doing Van Life across the US with friends. They know they need to get to a Starbucks for the 10am meeting and be at a truck stop for a meeting at 5, but outside those time periods developing locally and having slack for text chat on a spotty connection should be good enough.

Perhaps you should chat with Alan Cox? IIRC, he was on 28k dialup (over a couple of lines) whilst the more metropolitan of us were on ISDN. Adjust your workflow to your environment.

lol..

Congrats on trying to make a 35+ year old reference apply to remote work now.