Has anyone managed to pull off remote work while in a corp job?
My manager is also in Seattle, along with our entire reporting chain being US based.
It's worked brilliantly. Our group is probably an outlier though, as we have people scattered all over world, and for most of my time here, we've been focused on open source projects like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.
In short - yes, even mega corps can handle remote workers.
What part of the world do you live in/claim residency in? The reason I ask, is because I live in the US. If you're in the US or EU schengen zone, you can live and work almost anywhere in that particular area with no legal restrictions. For instance, my mailing address is in California, but I can easily move to Florida or Nevada or some state without a state income tax. Check your company's HR policy, I know there are a few states I'm not able to work from due to my company's policies.
If you work in a foreign country, that's a whole new can of worms. My company doesn't have a problem with you taking a month off and working a few weeks in India, for example, since it doesn't really make sense to fly to India for just 2 weeks due to travel times and jet lag, and you don't want to blow all your vacation at once.
However, if you're thinking of living for half a year in Ecuador, for example, even if the time zones line up, the company probably won't be as cool about it if they know about it, in my case.
The reason is that you're kinda breaking your tourist visa. You're not supposed to be doing any work, and if you are, you're supposed to be paying taxes to the country you're living in.
Now, it's a ridiculous argument, as you're pretty much living as a tourist, not taking a job from a local, and putting money in the local economy. However, if that's how your tourist visa is written, that's how it's going to be.
Now, if you're working for yourself as a freelancer, they probably won't go after you too hard, mainly because the upside is so limited. You can only squeeze so much blood from a stone, and they'll probably spend more money prosecuting you/doing audits than you'll pay back taxes.
However, since you and I (appear) to be working for large corporations, they have much more of an incentive to sue you. They can tack on penalties, and threaten a huge accounting/legal team to "discover other irregularities" in the company's HR policies in hopes of a large settlement. If that's the case, you gotta keep the fact that you're spending longer periods of time overseas to yourself.