Yeah, pick up your computer in person will not work if you live 2d travel away. If my remote job told me to pick up the computer in person after 8h of interviews and tests I'd be seriously pissed off. If they advertised it in the beginning I'd not have applied.
In my country (Poland) courier companies offer this service of "id checking and contract signing". You can have a courier deliver a contract, check the recipient's photo ID and confirm their identity, have the person sign the contract, return it and the courier takes it back.
If there is no such service available there is only one way to prevent this from happening, proper screening of candidates. In my 20+ years of working for Fortune 500 companies in positions not far from the top only 1 - a Japanese one actually screened my educational background and called my references and past employers to verify.
If employees worry they will loose some really good candidates that have no documentable background ask them to do some other security check. Do a video call from the main street of their home town. Or some other thing randomly selected from a set of 5. If the role is really important hire someone to visit the remote worker in their home and deliver that laptop in person. But don't expect them to travel to pick it up.
Sounds reasonable to me that the companies that hire to work remotely would like to have some live meet-ups once in a while. For the most part I wouldn't see a problem traveling to an employer's office for a week or so to start.
For working parents, it's pretty tricky. I ran a few remote organisations, and while there were usually decision makers that wanted mandatory meetups, I always tried to make it as optional as possible, and to eliminate the need for those where feasible.
In the age of vibe coding and North Korean fake workers, I'd probably go another way though. Trusting your remote workers used to be easier from my perspective.
You know the saying "trust but verify" :-) As mentioned before I think we need robust verification in place for things like new hire identity, but you mentioned an additional thing "vibe coding". The most obvious response to this is to have merge checks that run a bunch of tests on important stuff, and peer review.
My current place of work has rolled out both copilot and gemini coding assistants to everyone and so far I've not seen the expected flood of lower quality code or code clearly written by AI and not even being understood by the submitter. We're talking ~80 devs in 3 timezones just in my project. This is very encouraging.
Unless like me you live 8h travel by road away, and there are no reasonable flights, to the nearest office.
I made a decision long ago. Either a job is remote (I apply) in which case it has to really be remote. Or it is hybrid(I don't apply). If there is a day in a week/month/year that you're required to visit it is no longer 100% remote. This especially applies if it requires international travel, doubly so to certain places that make such travel even a bigger hassle than it needs to be (I didn't think US will be on this list in my lifetime, but here we are).
Perhaps I'm just annoyed it is very common in this job market (at least when I looked last ~2 years ago) to advertise 100% remote jobs, have 3 interviews during which you're assured "yes,100% remote" and then either get a contract that has provisions allowing for it to be revoked, or even being told verbally, or not even being told, but pressured as time goes by, no actually you're expected to visit. I had a client like this once. Otherwise a good job. The manager of my team got constantly a lot of crap that his people are "never in" despite the company hiring the whole team as a remote.
There are plenty of people in business that would love that whole remote thing to dissappear. It starts with "come to the office once a month for a night out, we'll pay for your hotel", then it's just "come to the office once a month", then it's 2 weeks, 1 week, then it's 3 days a week, and then it's just Friday you work from home, but no one actually works on that day, but you so you're blocked on most of what you do.
Who are these people? Managers that never learned how to manage remote teams, HR that worries their dept will be cut down, branch/country directors that can't show the visiting "leadership" an office buzzing with activity, and that guy who decided it's a good idea to buy a huge office building in the city centre a month before covid started (I've already worked fully remote for 3 years before covid started, but it was just me and another guy in a team of 9, now it is much better when the entire team is remote, there is no "us and them").
Sorry, just as luditites wanted to go to the power of muscle from the power of steam, there is no going back. The advantages to everyone are too great. To the employee, don't have to explain I hope, to the employer, lower cost and much bigger hiring market, to the entire world there is less travel and entire generations of people not wasting 20% of their waking hours on travel...
In my country (Poland) courier companies offer this service of "id checking and contract signing". You can have a courier deliver a contract, check the recipient's photo ID and confirm their identity, have the person sign the contract, return it and the courier takes it back.
If there is no such service available there is only one way to prevent this from happening, proper screening of candidates. In my 20+ years of working for Fortune 500 companies in positions not far from the top only 1 - a Japanese one actually screened my educational background and called my references and past employers to verify.
If employees worry they will loose some really good candidates that have no documentable background ask them to do some other security check. Do a video call from the main street of their home town. Or some other thing randomly selected from a set of 5. If the role is really important hire someone to visit the remote worker in their home and deliver that laptop in person. But don't expect them to travel to pick it up.