His boss begged him to stay -- he could even work remotely. My friend took the deal. He lives in Charlotte now and flies to LA every 2 or 3 months.
The best place to look for remote jobs is to talk to people who have worked with you in the past and trust you.
I had an awkward experience leaving my last company. I wanted to move and was willing to work remotely, but no one on my team or my immediate managers thought that was something the company would be willing to do so we agreed I'd resign. It wasn't until I had already accepted a job at another company that I started hearing from friends in other parts of the company that it was possible to become a remote worker. It was just so rare that my immediate team was quoting an old policy and they didn't bother to verify it with HR.
To be fair, the job I found has been great and I'm glad I left.
For those who are even thinking of bluffing e.g. along the lines of "lying" about "I will quit if I don't get a remote position" or "I am going to move", please don't. For the former, your credibility will be shattered if you they turn you down and you stay. For the latter, if you don't move, it will be even worse if it turns out you weren't ever planing to move. Also, you don't need to move to get a remote job (you might just have a horrid 1.5hr with traffic/15 mile commute from the outlying suburbs into the city center where the office is).
But how feasible is it to do this today when so much of the current crop of advice seems to be teams-over-individuals, nobody-is-indispensible messages telling managers to avoid letting programmers gain this kind of leverage at almost any cost?
Those places are usually career dead ends anyway, even if you're not bothered about working remotely.
Unfortunately, there are many places which only have employers like that which means you either move or you deal with it.
* What hours did you and your team work in the last month? (anything that indicates long hours are frequent is a red flag, not because long hours are intrinsically bad (though they are), but because it's usually being used as a proxy for measuring productivity).
* What is your policy on remote working? Who do you have remote working currently and under what circumstances? ("no remote working" is ok for me if there's a non-bullshit reason but YMMV).
* Who is currently your best or one of your better developers? How did you come to that conclusion?
* What characteristics do you look for in clean code vs. technical debt-laden code? How do you handle and plan for paying down technical debt?
* Who reads your team's pull requests? (worst answer is "nobody", 2nd worst answer is "the team").
* Have you read any of my code? What did you think?
I'm usually not looking for a perfect answer to all of these questions, just avoiding the companies that give an impression of widespread systemic dysfunction in their answers or a manager who is clueless.
What's the best answer you've heard for this one?
I never thought about teasing the red flags, but it makes more sense than just asking directly.
You could publish a list somewhere, I think a lot of people would find these valuable.
How did they work for you in practice?
Best/worst reactions to them?
Teams are composed of individuals, and we've set up things so that if the team doesn't depend on the knowledge of one individual. However, we still have people working remotely and the engineers are valued because they create value, not because they hoard knowledge.