I've done it several times. It always was for geographical considerations - I'm not able to relocate for personal reasons. If you can relocate or are living in

I've done it several times. It always was for geographical considerations - I'm not able to relocate for personal reasons. If you can relocate or are living in a relatively poor area, the financial consequences can be very attractive, I've had colleagues from eastern block countries in that situation. For me that part is a wash - but instead it allows to work for companies I personally consider more interesting and better fit to my skills, compared to the locally available jobs. You can indeed shift some activities that normally happen after work (and the two you mentioned are very typical) to moments during the workday, when such venues are much more quiet. This saves you time. In my case (and current job) it is also more interesting to work late in the evenings because I have to coordinate with a team in the Valley, which is far away from me timezone-wise. The time you save commuting is 100% won, either for your personal use or to work more for your employer/customers. This can be very substantial. Offering remote work isn't as easy a saying everyone can go home. You need management that understands what the employees are doing and can judge their output. You need infrastructure such as a secure chat and reliable videoconferencing. The latter is for some reason very hard to get right. You also need a good mindset that doesn't treat remotes as the exception, so you need either teams that are substantially remote, or managers that are remote. If you're working remotely, you need to deal with things such as potentially being lonely (I have friends on IRC, which are essential to keep me sane, other people go to co-working spaces or go grab coffee, etc), the risk of slipping sleep/work cycles, and good separation of work/home time (this is tricky, but my social life seems to be OK :P). I've found IRC just as conductive to getting into the company atmosphere as an office. It depends on the employer though. At least on IRC you don't risk sharing the office with the most boring people in the company. You can also regularly have real-life team meetings. My experience is that during those nothing gets done (exactly like working in an office j/k) but you can get to know your teammates a teeny bit better. Productivity-wise, the advantage of working from home is that you can keep on going if you're on a roll. You'll have bad days too, just like you can have bad days at the office. So: the downsides is that the company needs to invest a bit in this, and have a setup that's workable (enough people remote!) with a management and IT that can cope with this, and that it doesn't work as well for everyone. The upsides: you have much more latitude in hiring people, and you win the commuting time.