[4x5_Rules]

I've worked remote at a previous job for 8 years. The company really didn't handle communications with remote employees very well. Between that and not having the daily "coffee" chat with other employees, I felt I was missing out a lot. You can read all the stuff you like, but at times there is nothing better then bouncing ideas off your co-workers and seeing what sticks.

[philpem]

I'll second this. So many bugs become easy to solve when you try to explain the problem to a co-worker.

At my last job, we had a rubber-duck in the middle of the development floor. The first test was "Explain your problem to Ducky". About half of the time, the developer doing it would have a sudden epiphany half way through the explanation.

You could even book meetings with Ducky on Outlook... "Five-minute standup meeting with Ducky, meeting room 1"...

[dasmoth]

The fact that the duck can work (and pretty clearly it can for many folks) rather makes me question whether the co-workers are as important as some make out...

Aside: I’m rather sad Stack Overflow didn’t keep their April 1st rubber duck feature. I wonder if it actually worked “too well” and cut down on questions submitted...