I've been on (and managed) both in-house and remote teams. As an employee, I love the flexibility of working for a remote team -- you're more focused on gettin

I've been on (and managed) both in-house and remote teams. As an employee, I love the flexibility of working for a remote team -- you're more focused on getting the work done versus spending 'x' hours a day in your office or in your cube. On managing a remote team, it emphasized my need to ensure that everyone had a clear understanding of the tasks at hand for that day/week/month and that we were all communicating effectively (We used IRC, VoIP phones with a built in VPN (they could be on the 'network' when plugged into the back of the phone), and google hangouts). If you add in the fact that I'm basically in rural Appalachia (Eastern Kentucky) and there aren't that many DevOps/Linux SysAdmin jobs for guys out here -- I'm almost forced to be a complete remote resource for most companies. I've been doing a fair amount of interviewing recently -- I've had companies tell me that their engineering staff is completely remote but their DevOps team is an extension of corporate IT and that they need to be in the office for that (um, what?), that I'd be their first remote employee (scary), or that they have a cloud environment and they want a distributed team, but, everyone's in an office somewhere because they don't have enough internal support for a remote workforce. From a manager's perspective, letting go control of your team is scary: you lose the ability to check in on your employees by walking to their desk, you lose the 'butt in seat' visibility of your team, and you lose the 'over the cubical' conversations. What they don't immediately see is that those same things still exist, and still happen, but in different mediums. Employees will still chat amongst themselves in IRC, managers will still message people or note who is or isn't here based on activity. Giving up that control resulted in a productivity boost for my team -- almost everyone (there was one employee who had an interesting home situation and we had to get him office space to work) was twice as productive at home than they were in the office. We still had our team dynamic -- we'd meet up once a week for dinner and work from a shared working space one afternoon a week -- but we felt closer to one another and understood our goals and targets more.