> Why do you feel confident you can easily find other remote jobs with the same pay / benefits / work responsibilities / career opportunities / etc., if your current role goes bad?

I'm not the parent poster, but having moved to a rural area in January I've already experienced this. I spent a couple of days identifying target companies, and another couple getting my resume together and writing decent cover letters. After three weeks I was well into the interview process with five companies, and had an acceptable offer in hand after six.

> Maybe if you’re willing to compromise on everything else, then you can quickly switch to another remote job in an emergency.

That's part of the "trick" here - you have to be proactive in making sure you don't encounter an "emergency" like that. My goal is to have six months' of expenses in accessible cash, so if I did have to find other employment I'd not be desperate.

My recent layoff came at the worst possible time for me; I'd just drained my savings to come up with a down payment on a house and move. Because of this, I had to use a bit of credit to keep from having a major disruption for my wife and kids - but it was a "worst case situation" for which I had explicitly planned. It sucked but it was doable, and we went into it knowing exactly how long we could hold out and what actions we'd have to take if things didn't go the way we wanted.

Expenses living in a rural area a much lower than a city. For instance - my two-bedroom apartment in Charlottesville, VA was $1,860/month. My five-bedroom home on a half acre in Harrison, AR is $850/month on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. My utilities are less than half of what they were. The only exception is Internet access, which was included in my rent in Charlottesville and for which I now pay $180/month.

Food... A gallon of milk here is $1.85. Our groceries are less than half what they were.

> But it seems very suspect to set your life up with that risk and the possible requirement of that severe sort of compromise if you’re very desperate for a single specific perk.

There is risk in anything.

I wouldn't consider remote working a "perk" for me. It's merely a job requirement. Does it limit my options? Sure! So does my not wanting to work certain technologies, or on certain types of teams, or for companies in certain industries. I find that requiring remote work is less limiting than many of the other requirements I have for a job.

Finally, I'll say that it has been my experience that getting a remote job is much easier when you already have a remote job. I've found that it mirrors my experience with getting a job as a developer at all - I tried for a couple of years to get my first "development" job and failed. What I did manage to get was a position as "Intranet Administrator" that was mostly just managing policy changes and updating a static website. After working there for a while and sharing some utilities I'd written for my own use, suddenly other departments wanted to hire me for other jobs where they needed a "tech person". Eventually I ended up writing an "enterprise reporting platform" (which was really just a simple Django website with AD integration that generated some simple charts from SQL queries), which in turn finally gave me a title that sounded sufficiently like a developer ("Sr. Analyst, Systems & Performance Support") that it was accepted implicitly by my next employer.

At the end of the day - yeah, plan for the risk, but it's a risk that's both smaller and easier to offset through planning than you might think.