[ThePawnBreak]

At Google, it is completely not out of the ordinary to make 300k a year as a senior, or 200k after 2-3 years with the company. To get a remote job making that is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Also, nobody wants to hire junior remote people, so if you go to MIT it's either 160k at Google or 40k remote. Maybe after 4 years at Google someone'll be willing to pay you 50% of what you make there, but you don't really want to move away after being in a place for 4 years to get a remote job and be completely depended on your employer.

I'm from Eastern Europe and I tried to get a remote job before emigrating. I applied to dozens of places and could only get an interview at one company that was paying about 25k because Eastern Europe is cheap anyway. Was rejected for lack of experience. Got a job in Western Europe for 4x more.

In addition, the are many many interesting things to work on at Google and smart people to learn from, whereas the few remote jobs that exist are mostly making CRUD is the web framework du jour.

tl;dr There is almost no market for remote devs.