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Comment by rorrr | Hacker News Reader

I'm also working remotely, and it's absolutely fantastic. When people don't have to commute, and live where they want, happiness level is through the roof.

We also use Skype mostly for communication (although it's pretty shitty when it comes to searching chat logs).

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Skype chat is definitely the weakest link the chain for our remote team as well; it's basically unusable beyond a handful of groups. We've been migrating over to IRC for as much as we can. We also briefly toyed with using Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net/) for voip, and while it was pretty compelling in terms of cross-platform stability it never really took off in our organization.

The article mentions only moving off Skype if it's sufficiently advanced beyond Skype. IRC by itself is not, but we've got our own IRC server that adds some important features like indexing and catchup: http://writequit.org/blog/?p=444

Convore is pretty new, but have you tried it for private chats? When it was announced, I immediately started to think how much easier it would be to set up for my non-technical co-workers.

Link that explains basic functionality: http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-up-real-time-conversatio...

Tying you to the browser is only slightly better than tying you to a single client; textareas are not the kind of place you want to spend much time. I'd be game if there were an Emacs client.

It's true that there aren't a lot of clients out there for Convore yet. There are quite a few Convore projects started on GitHub (https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories) and more clients are welcome!

Convore looks promising, hope it will get support in clients soon .. either twitter-ones like tweetdeck, or im/irc ones like pidgin.

I've certainly decided that remote-working is worth a reasonable chunk of money in my salary when negotiating. It's not quite a must-have, but it's close.

Don't sell yourself short. It's also good for the employer. They can afford to pay you MORE if you're remote.

It's more that I'll consider a lower offer from a remote-friendly company than I would from one which requires in-office work. It's worth money to me to not have to commute, essentially.

Actually making the offer to them of "I will take $X/year less if you let me work from home" wouldn't be smart, just because if they took it then it'd put me into a weird special-case category which wouldn't be at all good for my integration with their team.

Another happy remote worker!

Microsoft Office Communicator is great in that sense - it nicely integrates with Outlook(Calendar/Free-busy/OOO etc.), chats are searchable from within the OS and within Outlook just like emails. Best part is if I am outside with my phone (haven't found a nice OCS client for Android yet) and I miss a conversation it emails me with the conversation which I can continue over email.

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