If you had the choice would you commute to your works office everyday (maybe 1-2 hours each way) to do web development or would you prefer to stay at home spend an extra few hours with your family? Would you turn down / negotiate terms on a job proposal if you always work from home but a prospective employer doesn't agree with remote employees?

After being freelance for a few years, I got an in-house developer job working from home. There are also pros and cons to working from home against going into the office.

Communication is always a problem with remote staff, with the help of instant messaging and file transfers (Skype, IRC, msn, etc) staff can talk much easier - but there are just some things that are best done face to face. One of the biggest problems I think is the final design / layout changes before a site launch. If you are in the office this can take from a few minutes to an hour or two but doing remotely this can take a day or two.

There are some more obvious pros to working from home, I find working from home much more relaxing than in an office - I can listen to my own music (Iron Maiden - although it's not that relaxing) and I am in my own environment which is much better for productivity.

But working from home has one major drawback, You never leave the office. 9 - 5 becomes more like 8-6 or when you wake up - when you go to bed. It's very hard to detach from work unless you are lucky enough to have a study / spare room to use as an in house office your entire house becomes your office. This is the biggest downside that I have learnt over the past few years.

Upon reading this post from calevans I think that the web development world could gain so much more from allowing more people working from home, and employers could be more open to allowing remote staff in their companies