I work for a 100% remote company (no office at all) and I remote pair program almost every day.

We use Google hangouts and tmux for most of it. If I'm working with certain people, we end up using ScreenHero.

You learn to say things like "you take over" or "I'm taking over" to make sure the other person doesn't try to type at the same time.

Remote pairing took me all of a few hours to get used to and it's been very productive.

As a lead for a team, I have to take meeting minutes and it's been a dream to just mute my mic and not have people get distracted by typing, coughing and other noise while they are speaking.

I can share more about my remote pairing experience if you'd like. But I think the above covers it.

Easy, just don't pair program. It was never a good idea to begin with.

Sococo (I work there) does a good job. Share apps (not desktops); talk and video, pointers and web apps all work together to make pair programming pretty seamless.

Heh, it looks like a game. Gauntlet or something. Strange model to deliberately capture the office layout even.

It looks so much like a game of "Cluedo" I'd be tempted to try a murder to see how it worked. "It was Thad, in Patrick's office, with the pistol"

Yeah some issues with the graphics causing credibility problems. But that's exactly what makes the presence work so well - "Patrick is in Thad's office, and they're both yelling!" Try that with any other tool

But part of the advantage of remote-work is that you can be in two or more conversations at once, that you can be in two or more 'places' at once.

No?

Seems odd to use a location metaphor, when online you can be in more than one place at a time.

Chatting works that way. But your video and audio don't.

Man I wish sococo supported linux, our team is a mix of linux and mac and we would love to use it and pay for it. We've got 128 people around the world but without linux support we can't :(

If you can give me any timeline till a linux version I would appreciate it, bwbbwb@gmail.com

Tried Wine? Some have success with that, though getting audio set up can be tricky.

There's a web version under development right now - it should work with Chrome and Firefox.

Check out Floobits.

Searched Youtube for a demo. This was what I found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-Qjaa2vjQ

"Unlike the web, we're centralized so we control how much value we capture, much like twitter"

I shuddered.

Truth is I don't really like being in the seat of pair-programming anyway. I like to be free to make incredibly stupid mistakes while I feel my way to an answer and someone shoulder-surfing me inhibits my thought process as I wonder what they'll think of it rather than just the "it" itself.

It's okay as the shoulder-surfer though, especially when training someone.

We've used screenhero (now part of slack).