[QUOTE=MeanJoe]
I also am a remote employee, I work from home and the “office” is in San Jose and New York City. I may travel to NYC or San Jose once a quarter for team meetings. My position does require me to travel a bit, to client sites for presentations/meetings. Usually these are not more than 1-day trips.
I love it but I find most of my friends have an unrealistic view of “working from home”. There are definite perks, as most people in this thread have pointed out. There are down sides too:
Networking - It is difficult to build relationships with management that can help advance your career. It is also difficult to build relationships with peers like engineers, product mgmt people, etc., that are critical to being successful in my role. I also miss the social aspects of an office job, whether it be football pools, happy hours, team lunches, etc.
Discipline - I do think it is a bit more difficult to be disciplined when working from home. Heck, I’m posting this on the Dope and not worried about my boss walking into my cubicle anymore! 
Hours - I find I work far more hours per week when I work in a telecommute environment. They may not be sequential hours, but more hours per day. As someone else in the thread mentioned, you never leave work. It is always right there where you eat, sleep, and socialize.
MeanJoe
[/QUOTE]
Except for the “mostly one-day trips” bit, I could have written most of this. I’ve had two positions in the last 10 years where I had no official office space outside my home (including my current job). Most of my work is with my company’s customers or our consultants, most of whom are either on the road at customer sites or working from their own homes. With high-speed internet access and VPN access to our company net, plus a company issued BlackBerry phone, it hardly matters whether I’m at home, on site at a customer, or in our home office. But it is hard to build up the collegial relationships with people in other departments that I’ve generally enjoyed when I was in a more traditional office environment.
We moved almost two years ago, and one of our criteria for a new house was a place I could work from home with some physical isolation from the rest of the family. Got that in spades, with a full finished basement with a living room including a full kitchen, bedroom (my office) with a full bathroom, closet/laundry room, etc. The basement has its own HVAC system and thermostat. Even has windows out onto our back yard. My only real complaint about it is that my company uses T-Mobile for its Blackberry accounts, and reception for T-Mobile is lousy in my office (the lot slopes down to a creek with woods in the back, and the office is on the back of the house, so I’m down in a hole with pine trees all around. I have to go at least up to the second story of the house to get reception sometimes. I can go a quarter-mile away to a coffee shop and have maximum signal.
It’s sometimes difficult to resist the temptation to get distracted by other things, but in general what I’m doing is visible enough to both internal and external parties that if I’m slacking off it’ll be obvious. I also don’t sweat it if I have to (or decide to) take an hour here or there to deal with an errand or a meeting at the kids school, or if I have to run upstairs and restore order among the offspring after they get home from school. I spend enough time on the road that whatever time I’m away from work during the day is more than made up for by the hours I put in during the mornings between the time the kids leave for school and our official start time, and in the evenings after they’re in bed, not to mention the time on planes and in hotel rooms on the road. It was harder in my other remote job, when what did was a lot less obvious to others. I could have gotten away with a lot more. In that situation, I found it was really useful to me to get up and get dressed and drive my son to preschool (about a 40 minute round trip). That made a nice demarcation between “home time” and “work time” – I just looked at it as my commute to work – when I got back home it was time to start work, and I was up and dressed and going that way.
As expected, he rolled his eyes and left the room with a smile on his face but he didn’t come back into the office after that!