Thanks for the informative counter-example - it's certainly possible, and congratulations on your company's success. I agree communication is key to keeping things going, and perhaps in tech companies this is easier (my work was in publishing at the time, quite an old-fashioned industry).

The managers I was interacting with were not technically minded, so that might make a difference, email was the main medium. But the problems I saw as a small company were more related to staying in touch with disparate clients and cultivating work over the long term than working day to day - the people making subcontracting decisions tended to forget you were there if you were never in the client office. This might depend on size and industry as well as communication - smaller companies probably depend on networking more than larger ones.

I agree with the parent commenter completely, but there is a difference between grey-area and you.

You imply being an employee of a company with remote workers. Grey-area is discussing the difficulties of being a remote independent contractor/consultant.

Being remote independent is difficult, since you're not just in the technical position, but you're also in sales (selling your skills). Obtaining leads means networking with decision makers--finding, meeting, networking with them; discovering what their itch is, and you're the right person to scratch it--and more often than not, doing so requires physical presence in social situations. It's hunting for a new job every 6-12 months.

But it is great being in charge of your own destiny.

That sums up the difference much better than I did - thanks.

We do this with developers in the US, Canada, Latin America, and western Europe. We use plenty of IRC, Hangouts, and of course, email.

A lot of our recruitment has been done through networks of contacts in the open source community, which I think starts us out with a pool of self-motivated people who can communicate well over the internet.

Same here. I work as part of a two-man team that exists within a larger organization which is based in Norway. I live in the US and my colleague lives in Sweden. However, we have developers that we work with in Ukraine, business meetings that he attends in Copenhagen and Norway, and business contacts all over Scandinavia and parts of Europe.

We use Skype primarily for day-to-day communication, and of course email is a big part of the picture. But we also just make plain voice calls (sometimes phone, sometimes skype depending on connectivity).

Then we also use Zendesk to keep our workload visible and organized. So, overall, it's a very smooth process.

If you don't mind, please drop me a line about which company you work for (or post up here).

I'm not on the job market now (necessarily), but am keeping an eye out for your kind of companies and would love to keep yours on my radar, if possible.

EDIT - My email and all contact info are in my profile.

It can work..but rarely does it work well unless you have a really good manager and a really good team. Even then, there are tons of mis-communications along the way. I have experienced this working on remote teams.