I've been working as a full-time programmer from home for about a year and a half now, and it's beginning to get a bit weird. Aside from not having physical coworkers, I don't leave work, go home and do something else, because work is always all around me. There's this never-ending pattern of 9-5 quickly becoming 2 PM - 8 AM, until I finally pull an all nighter and it resets.
It doesn't help that I'm 100% passionate about what I do...!
I was the last survivor of a 30 person development office. That in itself was eerie.
Initially my sleep cycle (and therefore working hours) shifted by a couple of hours, so I'd get out of bed about 11am, and start work somewhere around 12, which effectively meant I had an hour before I stopped for lunch at 1, and then ended up working until 9 in the evening.
If I were single I could probably be quite happy with that, but it meant I only really got a couple of hours with my wife before she went to bed. That alone gave me the motivation to get back into the habit of starting work at 9, and finishing between 5 and 7.
I'll also second the comment by the person who said that it helps to have something planned for the evening, if only to force you into stopping work by that time.
At work we spend 80% of the day pairing over voip and SSH. It's ironic because I moved from California to Seattle because I got tired of telecommuting all by my lonesome from down there, but these days with pairing it doesn't bother me at all.
Specifically, are you sharing a screen session with VIM in a terminal or what?
Do you rotate pairs or is it always the same person? How would you compare your remote pairing setup with live, in-person pairing?
I haven't done much in-person pairing, but I think the main difference is not having to share a keyboard. Each person can use a system they're comfortable with; no fuss about dvorak vs qwerty, Kinesis vs Natural 4000, standing desk vs sitting, or Ubuntu vs Macosecks. It does mean you need to use auditory cues to indicate who is in control of a given session. The biggest drawback is probably that you can't share a web browser over SSH, but since we are doing backend coding it doesn't affect us.
For me it's been a huge win. We do also have week-long meetings a few times a year to bring the whole team together in-person to promote the team's cohesion. But working from home is great; as long as I'm able to switch things up occasionally by working from a coffee shop a couple times a week, I'm happy.
Obviously, some of the things you mentioned with in-person pairing can be alleviated. At my current client, our setup includes multiple keyboards and mice. A friend of mine uses his own keyboard with a hardware switch to go between dvorak and qwerty.
You mention not being able to share a browser which makes me think of the times where it would have been convenient to look something up for a moment while my pair experimented (two pronged problem solving approach... :).
Also, what kind of pairing patterns do you use in this setup? Ping Pong TDD, driver/navigator, etc... ?
Definitely. Occasionally we'll read docs in w3m, but often it's good to go async on looking up some boring details.
What we do is probably more driver/navigator since whomever is hosting usually has better latency. The remote guy can still get around just fine, but it's just barely noticeable enough to give an edge to the host. Since we work in a language that makes it easy to do strict FP, (Clojure) test-first is not as important as it would be in an imperative language, though we do have pretty good coverage.
I meet a friend to go climbing two nights a week, which pretty much forces me to stop working at a certain time two days a week. Having those two days anchored seems to help stop the other days drifting into other time zones.