Ask HN: Do you feel/fear that you're more disposable as a remote employee?

Absolutely, yes.

My experience is that remote work is the exception, not the norm. The only way to get stability as a remote employee is to have an exclusive skill or some other advantage over the other employees, eg. "I'm the only remote employee, but I'm the only one who is a proven data science whiz," "The company cannot find enough locals who know Scala," etc. And even then, your stability is still contingent on this supply/demand imbalance.

Proximity is always valued over remote.

There is something human about being able to see the person who is doing some work for you. To be able to say hello without agenda. Ask how it's going.

Yes you can do it with Slack and Skype but nothing beats walking over to someone.

In large companies, working remote made me feel disposable. Small companies, if you can get stuff done, you feel valuable while being autonomous.

Nah...we're all remote :)

Years ago when I was a remote employee, I definitely did become marginalized. Projects I took on and completed were often assumed to have been done by an on site employee. People on calls sometimes spoke of me as if there was no chance I was on the call. The CEO even talked about getting me to train my replacement, apparently assuming I wasn't part of the call concerning the department of which I was the lead.

I've found that the issue with being a remote employee is the employee part. My experience has been that trusting your job security to an employer is just not as safe as it used to be. Nowadays as a freelancer who works on mostly long-term contracts, it's possible that some of my clients wouldn't think much of replacing me, but if they do decide to stop using me, I can grab another contract. My office doesn't change. My machine is still my machine, i.e. they're often the more replaceable one.

However, and as others point out here, this only works if you have lots of experience in something highly in demand.