Tell HN: Recruiters are lying about remote positions

Isn't it true of both? Team match?

Very few workers in the U.S. have actual employment contracts. If you work in the tech sector in the U.S. you almost certainly don't. Instead, your employment is "at-will"; i.e. terminable by either party, with or without cause or notice (unless you live and work in Montana). You may have received a written offer of employment when you were hired (outlining your title, salary, hiring bonuses, etc.), but that is not an employment contract. The important distinction for the OP is that a written offer of employment is not legally binding. They can lie or change their minds.

I was offered the opportunity to work 100% remotely for a large financial corporation which has the bulk of its operations in my home town. This was back in 2006. One of my best friends was outfitted with a DS1 to his house back in the mid '90's so he could work remotely.

tl;dr: Telecommuting has been around for decades and is only going to become more common, not less. The pandemic merely accelerated the trend.

Similarly, I focused on companies that were based abroad but hiring in the US. Can't be forced to commute from Seattle to Mexico City.

And if anyone is interested in for real remote work, we're hiring SDE & Sr SDE frontend (React) and backend (Python). See my profile for contact info if interested.

It's hard to know what happened here without knowing the company and the internals - I know for Google, for the hiring committees I'm aware of (I'm a PM hiring committee member), we cant' even easily see where the candidate is based vs. where the role is based, and it's not something we take into account. We don't care, we just want to say whether the candidate passed the bar to work at Google, and from there it's between them and whatever team they're joining.

Now, there are other places where problems can arise. For example most (all?) hires go to a VP-level review, which is mostly a rubber stamp for more junior levels, but I have seen a few cases where a VP steps in with concerns about a candidate, and potentially that's what happened here - the hiring manager didn't have buy-in up the chain for the role location, and it got flagged at some point.

I'll also throw out there that maybe the recruiter was not wholly truthful, from the perspective that perhaps there was some other problem, either concerns around passing the hiring committee or negative internal references, and the recruiter told you that the remote was the issue instead. I haven't seen a recruiter be directly untruthful, but I have seen situations where the recruiter represented things slightly differently in order to try to keep the candidate's morale up.

As an example, I once got asked to do an interview redo for a candidate - this happens from time to time, either because an interview had to get cut short, or the candidate did really poorly and they want to give them another chance, or the interviewer left the company, but they don't tell you the situation when they ask you to re-interview so as not to bias you. When I spoke to the candidate, they said they'd been told something about the interviewer leaving bad notes and transferring orgs, so they had to redo it - I redid the interview, filed my feedback, and later found out that actually the candidate had bombed the previous interview, so much so that the hiring committee felt like it was an outlier and requested a re-interview.

Again, this is just from my narrow window on one company, but I wanted to share some of the dynamics at at least one company in the FAANG space.