I don't mean to sound harsh, but it does sound like front/ backdoor metaphor is code for filtering people by the social biases that form much of the personal connections and networks you mention.
The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.
The comments above you replied to were saying something different to your interpretation, I believe.
They were saying that by going remote (the last 5 years), people haven't formed as many deep connections by legitimate social connections at jobs and their reputation. You could say this is the "good" or "reputation" based way of getting jobs in the back door and it's not all just likeability. So there is less of this kind of back door hiring right. I don't know if this is true or not.
But the back door hiring for nepotism or "my brothers girlfriend" is still as ever present, since the connections aren't predicated on real life in person social interactions.
Discrimination or disadvantage comes in to neither of these hiring methods innately. Subconscious bias could exist for back door recommendations ofcourse.
So if anything, it's not really leveling anything. It just means for increasingly experienced engineers, benefits don't accrue so much when looking for work if remote. If anything these backdoor references could help people (e.g. from poor families) get a shot even despite other innate culture differences (e.g. style of speaking). And nepotistic hires will remain.
Think it has to do with trust. If a hiring manager, for example, has a contributor who is good and recommends a former colleague, that resume can get to the front of the line. There are plenty of engineers who are interview/leet code ninja's or have fluffy resumes. Getting someone to vouch for work ethic, skills, etc of a candidate carries allot of weight. Thats just the reality. Its less risk of a bad hire if you have first hand knowledge of a candidate.
Be open to the fact that people watch content of sex workers of all ages, genders sizes, and levels of attraction. What is 'prime' for you, might not be someone else's cup of tea.
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Unimaginative leadership that didn't trust their teams. Prototyping the 'experience' (mostly happy path) in a design tool, gave them 'visibility' into what the product could become.
At a certain point you might not have enough third party devs to really exercise an API or drive adoption and developing a first party app is a good way to get the party started.
Assuming all the action takes place in a confined room it is not a particularly difficult problem to solve compared to an OASIS or Sword Art Online-like virtual environment which would have the problems of an open world game to solve.
I get that this is an upgrade, but it is a 'change' to the configurations that the customer set up their instance with. It would have been outrageous if they opted everyone is without their consent.
The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.