There is a phrase I see on roughly half of every "remote" posting I read this year: fully remote / work from anywhere . Then I started asking the people who write those postings what the phrase actually means. Twelve hiring managers, four 1:1 conversations a week, written follow-ups for the rest. The answers don't match the postings. This is not a complaint. It is the friction layer that keeps costing candidates real offers — accepting a "fully remote" role and then discovering, three months in, that there was a quiet expectation about quarterly travel, or a four-hour overlap window that wasn't disclosed, or a state-tax restriction the recruiter never asked about. So I went back to the source. Here is what hiring managers actually meant when they wrote "fully remote." The 12 answers I sorted the responses into five buckets after about eight conversations. The remaining four didn't add a sixth bucket, just more variance inside the existing ones. 1. Time-zone-bounded remote (4 of 12).…