Working from home might genuinely be the ideal environment for those closest to the introvert end of the spectrum, and I think those are the people who form angelic choirs of blog posts asking if you have met their lord and savior, the Fortress of Infinite Solitude, Home Office Edition. For them, the quiet work environment makes their jobs dramatically more enjoyable. But for me, it was the opposite: I’d gone from management (high social interaction) to software development (lower social interaction), and from working in an office (hundreds of people) to working from home (two cats), and expected that this would all be fine.
Am I missing something here? Paying $1000/mo rent for a remote space seems insane. At best, that's 15% of your take-home salary. You're basically forcing yourself to work 15% more than you would without an office.
I'd take the extra 15% of free time over the hit in the "socialness" of my office space. I can get that social fix during that time instead.
> Industrious seems nice. It would be a good option if you're a Lawyer or CPA or something where you need to keep up appearances; i.e. clients physically coming in and talking to you.
I don't know that Industrious is the right place for a lawyer or CPA. Maybe a rather nontraditional one. But I would expect someone like that to prefer traditional "Class A" office space a la Regus.
> However, as a software engineer, it seems like the only benefit is social. And with that, from a financial standpoint, it doesn't make much sense to me. You're basically paying to work.
Well, if you buy the premise of the articles—both the parent and mine—then that benefit has value. It has a lot of value to certain kinds of people. By the sound of it, you do not have such high psychological needs. :-)
I didn't talk about it in my article, but the OP did in his: getting one's social fix outside of work isn't that easy, particularly if it's work-related socialisation that is the deficiency you're trying to address.
Having said that, even Industrious doesn't magically fix certain existential problems. For instance, I'm in VoIP, so I have relatively little to discuss or collaborate on with the usual array of people who commonly inhabit such places: SEO/web marketing firms, web developers, miscellaneous ad and marketing agencies, etc.
Industrious had less of these than the typical coworking space, and the tenants of that nature who were there were less obnoxious, but still: being in an exotic and highly technical niche removes a lot of the benefits of shared work culture and water cooler talk, the ability to bounce ideas off officemates or answer their questions, etc.
edit: $1000/mo is pretty steep for a one-person office. Industrious didn't charge me quite that much. But it was pretty up there.
Whoops. I probably should have proofread my comment before submitting. Your response seems almost nonsensical now that I've butchered my original post D: Sorry about that.
It's been awhile since I've needed to look for coworking spaces, but I have to say- what an excellent blog post! It seems so rare these days to read something that goes into detail about something like this.
To such an extent do I relate to it that I wrote a blog post about it a year ago:
https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-ab...
This post struck a similar note:
Working from home might genuinely be the ideal environment for those closest to the introvert end of the spectrum, and I think those are the people who form angelic choirs of blog posts asking if you have met their lord and savior, the Fortress of Infinite Solitude, Home Office Edition. For them, the quiet work environment makes their jobs dramatically more enjoyable. But for me, it was the opposite: I’d gone from management (high social interaction) to software development (lower social interaction), and from working in an office (hundreds of people) to working from home (two cats), and expected that this would all be fine.