Working remotely is hard

Working remotely is excellent. 1.5 hours less commuting - that's more time to get work done or go to the gym or read the news. No one can come to my desk to socialize or ask a quick question to fuck up my flow. No one requiring me to arrive at an office at an arbitrarily early time. No dress code. No ad hoc meetings in the conference room. Listening to music I like aloud. All conf calls done on speaker. I'm home to receive any deliveries. I could go on.

I totally agree with you. When I started to work as a freelancer I felt the same for the first year. That's why I dediced to start, with a former coworker of mine, a coworking place with accessible rates near the city where I lived. Now that I'm not a freelancer anymore, and I don't run actively Meme coworking[0] anymore, I'm proud because it's still active and full of interesting people!

[0] http://memecoworking.com

I'm the CTO of 17hats. The entire engineering team works remotely. It's not as challenging as you seem to suggest. Right now is the best time ever to be remote.

Excellent tools like Slack and Speak really help comms. We pair program very often by sshing into a tmux session which makes any lag close to nil. We use Trello for sprints. And Invision for product work. It's extremely efficient.

We have our usual retrospectives and watercooler talk and it feels natural.

Every 6 months we get together for fun.

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The advantages of being remote far outweigh the disadvantages. Rather than listing all the advantages. What are the disadvantages?

..I'm thinking.

My house has a microwave, and I get good use of it!

I'd like to see some analysis of this from the employer's side. By which I mean, how does it affect you as a manager when you have reports that work remotely?

Personally I have observed that some people who work remotely suffer from delusions as to what happens in the office when they're not there. They'll scoff at the lack of progress of the office workers, compared to their own majestic productivity - ignoring the fact that someone needs to be back at base coordinating all of this stuff, dealing with customer situations, walk-ins from product managers and execs, etc. etc.

A further elaboration of this is when remote workers expect to impose some kind of extreme rigour on their unfortunate office-bound colleagues. They might insist on 24 hours advance notice of important design discussions, which could otherwise take place at the water cooler, just to be sure they can be included.

When told thats not the way the world of work works, they may play down the effectiveness of the water cooler discussions, when most people have observed first hand just how beneficial those serendipitous hallway meetings can be, and how detrimental it can be to have to delay important discussions until the remote people can be involved.