[paulhauggis]

I worked at two companies where everyone worked remotely.

I think one of the big differences I noticed is that I never felt like I was that close to the rest of the team. We talked a few times/week through Webex or Skype, but it's just not the same as being there in person.

Communication was also a big issue. It's not impossible to have good communication remotely, but I've rarely seen it in practice.

[minthd]

It might be because companies use cheap tools for collaboration and not go for something like telepresence that gives experience very close to a real one, including eye-contact - which is criticial in trust and bonding.

Also, to the best of my knowledge nobody applied telepresence directly as a bonding tools - it's mostly used for straight work, because(at least the cisco versions) are quite expensive.

[yason]

IRC has always worked well. Done this in several companies. IRC is both real-time and offline. Even your toaster can run an IRC client so it's completely platform independent which is a big thing with engineers.

In a work environment people stay on global and per-team IRC channels. You can a) chat online if there are colleagues online and b) when you get back from your coding session you can always review what others have been talking about since yesterday. You can also chat in a relaxed way as in replying back every 10 minutes or whenever you don't have more important things to finish. This means you can extend your online presence over the workday with a latency of checking back several times an hour while still not getting bounced by each and every message someone decided to send you.

[onedev]

The missing part might have been Empathy.

[paulhauggis]

I think you are onto something here. One of the things I remembered that really bothered me about my last remote job was that the boss would constantly change the scope of the project right before the deadline..and extend the deadline even further.

I was never part of many of the decision-making meetings with the boss and my project manager and I felt like the manager never had our back. After we met onsite for our first bi-yearly 1-week meeting, I realized that he didn't really have any choice in the matter and did in-fact fight for us when these decisions were made.

[cwbrandsma]

I keep forgetting to enable that feature!

[IndianAstronaut]

This might be good since it can prevent a lot of bullshit politics that come with offices.

[tankenmate]

It's good that it dulls the bad side of human interaction, but the converse is also true; and therein lies the rub.