On top of the firewall at work likely to hinder you, is the fact that your DSL/Cable firewall also is going to need to be configured to allow your "socket" traffic through to the server behind it. The configuration should be quite similar to the configuration used to make the website accessable to the rest of the world.

So, to answer your actual question, you can not get past a firewall using only socket programming. You must configure all the firewalls between you and the destination to allow the socket traffic.

-Scott