I've never been a full-time developer, but I find that a lot of the passion around remote/distributed work often misses something for people starting out.

Communication systems were a lot different when I started in the tech world. But it's really really hard for me to imagine starting out in a world where I was sitting in my apartment all day. Remote doesn't mean working alone of course. But I would certainly have found the relative isolation difficult even given today's messaging and videocon apps.