I am. At least partly. I was the first remote dev at Fog Creek, and I can see very much where some of these rules came from.
There are essentially two main themes here. The first is communication. When I started work, we hadn't been doing video chats, since everyone was on site. A lot of communication happened in HipChat and everything else was either at the weekly stand-up or impromptu meetings between two devs. However, once someone is offsite, all of the in-person communication is cut off. This removes context from the chat rooms, and filling in that context over chat is often more difficult than just explaining it. In our case, this was compounded by us being forced to abandon our chat software to find a new system and going through two inferior systems, which cut me off even more from the teams. If regular video calls had been policy, it would have been much easier to work out the chat situation.
The second is distraction-free work environments. Early in my remote work, I went to visit my significant other in another country for several weeks, working remotely while she was at work. Unfortunately, there was a problem getting her internet installed before I got there, so I spent the first week working from a McDonald's (it had the most reliable wifi). I know my productivity suffered for it during that week. Fortunately, we got internet working and I had a better environment to work from after that.
I left the company about 18 months ago, but from what I understand, none of these policies are due to any intentional abuse of the system, but more from experience with the difficulties of remote work in a company that is used to having everyone on site.
There are essentially two main themes here. The first is communication. When I started work, we hadn't been doing video chats, since everyone was on site. A lot of communication happened in HipChat and everything else was either at the weekly stand-up or impromptu meetings between two devs. However, once someone is offsite, all of the in-person communication is cut off. This removes context from the chat rooms, and filling in that context over chat is often more difficult than just explaining it. In our case, this was compounded by us being forced to abandon our chat software to find a new system and going through two inferior systems, which cut me off even more from the teams. If regular video calls had been policy, it would have been much easier to work out the chat situation.
The second is distraction-free work environments. Early in my remote work, I went to visit my significant other in another country for several weeks, working remotely while she was at work. Unfortunately, there was a problem getting her internet installed before I got there, so I spent the first week working from a McDonald's (it had the most reliable wifi). I know my productivity suffered for it during that week. Fortunately, we got internet working and I had a better environment to work from after that.
I left the company about 18 months ago, but from what I understand, none of these policies are due to any intentional abuse of the system, but more from experience with the difficulties of remote work in a company that is used to having everyone on site.