I'm working completely remote [1] for 2 years now. Wouldn't want to miss it again. I have two kids, 2 and 1 years old, and the office was the far noisier envi

I'm working completely remote [1] for 2 years now. Wouldn't want to miss it again. I have two kids, 2 and 1 years old, and the office was the far noisier environment. Constant nagging, "Can you just for a moment" interruptions and people playing foosball (or whatever you call the tables on which you can waste a lot of time shouting and kicking hard plastic around) in the next room... Not for me. Home does have its challenges, certainly. But for me it's the far better trade. Now, communication and tools: I prefer less. We're a Windows/MS shop, so it's Office 365 (worst. thing. ever. [2]) and Lync (sad..) for us. I'd prefer mail, in a decent way, and a reasonable chat (IRC would work fine, but HipChat et al might work just as well). I have a corporate phone, that is with me all the time. People _can_ reach me - in theory - 24/7 with that. That's enough. I have no need in this job for sketches on a virtual whiteboard. I couldn't care less about conferences (aka discussions with > 4-5 participants). Phone's fine, mail is for persistence and tracking, git is for source code and .. that works pretty well. Sad to hear that it didn't work our for StatusPage.io, but I'm convinced that this model can work perfectly fine. 1: Remote as in 'Less than a single digit number of days in the office per year', although the distance to the Real Office™ is manageable at about 90-100km one way, same country. 2: WSDL files? Can't open those in OWA for example, because everything that looks like XML is obviously 'scary'. OWA 'protects' you and according to our IT Office 365 doesn't allow you to fix that. WSDL is just one example of gazillion, I should by now create a template for the "Sorry, dear customer. Our mail server is batshit crazy and acting up. Can you zip that stuff/share it in other ways?" mails I send regularly. Your company/coworker uses s/mime? Forget about using OWA, it will either throw around scary warnings or .. just refuse to open the message completely.