After working from a home office for five years, moving into a coworking space last fall was a game-changer. I'm not the kind of person that gets excited about much, but I couldn't help but wax poetic about it to every person I talked to for a solid month. The work-life separation, perks of being downtown, and network effects of being around other entrepreneurs has hugely amped up my productivity and opened doors for my businesses. I've heard that the quality of these spaces varies widely, but as a developer all I need is a permanent desk to leave my monitor/keyboard/mouse, for the third of the price of an office.
Isn't the third of the price of an office still quite a substantial amount of money? Can I ask what kind of space you get? I always imagined a small desk or cubicle for each person (individual renting). I ran my own business for awhile but jumped out because it was just so expensive and it was very difficult to separate life and work with a family.
It's $225 a month for a reserved desk which is essentially a less closed-off cubicle with a lockable file cabinet. This was comparable to other coworking locations in my city (Salt Lake).
Please let me know too. I wanted to set one up in Palatka FL. I found a building. Had a possible budget of 150k. Sadly, the building owner wanted 350k for a termite infested building. Wouldn't budge.
I would have offered broadband, AC, small kitchen and choice of standing desk or traditional tables (all home made with plywood of course) for about $20 a week. Then offered 24/7 access for around $30.
One of the biggest perks of working from home for me is not having to commute to work. Having to get up and drive downtown every morning sounds awful, so I'm surprised you listed it as a perk.
Do you live in a place with good public transport or do you actually not mind having to drive downtown every day?
I live in a bikeable medium-sized city (Salt Lake), so it's a ten-minute bike ride or 20-minute bus ride for me. I really like the atmosphere of being downtown, especially all the food options.
Exactly the same here. I actually only go to co-working spaces when I have very little work to do but the urge to be among people. When I need to be productive, I stay home.
A coworking space sounds amazing compared to our current office setup, somehow management has landed on the the worst of all worlds. Teams are in horseshoe shaped areas with managers in glass walled private offices facing into the horseshoe. The plain old worker scrubs like me, however, are in tiny cubicles that are about waist high within the horseshoe, and they have three people crammed into each cubicle in parts of the office. So you get all of the noise and lack of privacy of an open office layout (your manager is straight up watching your monitor from his or her private office), but we are on these crappy desktops so no mobility like one would have in an open office...
I think it began as an experiment in making the ultimate office. Everyone would have a quiet, private workspace, and the horseshoe space would be this reconfigurable area with couches and whiteboards for standups and meetings and the social aspects of business. Of course what happened was when the company grew, the idealistic horseshoe space turned into temporary overflow cubicles which quickly became permanent cubicles.
> Do you plan to stay in that place? It doesn't sound like a very positive working environment.
It is a tad Orwellian, so no, I'm out after a year or so. :)
I worked in one and it was awful. Always had to be hoping that your neighbor was respectful, and even if you got lucky and they were, then you had to hope that they stayed long enough, before some other neighbor came in and ultimately created an undesirable co-working space.
It's 2017 and we have the internet. When will (internet) companies start embracing telecommuting more?
The internet still sucks in 2017. I still can't make a 3-way video call between people in 3 countries without having to say "Can you hear me" every 5 minutes and then having to repeat stuff all the time.
Doubly forget having a productive meeting if one of those people is on Comcast, has a crappy Wi-Fi router, is in China, can't figure out how to get their microphone to work, or has babies yelling in the background.
I'm all for telecommuting as a concept but we aren't there yet.
I can vouch for Zoom, I use it daily in chats with 5-10 people in 5+ countries and frequently with more, it works flawlessly given a decent connection (basic DSL).
I wish the UI was a bit better though (e.g. consistently working way to see who is talking is a feature that is not there or, it seems, sometimes it is and then disappear).
There are several people at my coworking space who work remotely for companies overseas, as well as quite a few individual contractors or 2 person businesses. They can work from home if they want to (and sometimes do), but they like coming into a space where they work around other people who are also working.
They work here because they get a clear separation between work and home, and because they get lonely working at home, as well as losing key networking opportunities. I don't mean networking in the "make me money" way, but just in the "meet other people who do the same thing" way.
Not everyone wants to work from home. I never could, I'd be spending in excess of 16 hours a day in the same little space, that sounds like a special kind of hell for me, it would be like prison. I think that there's nothing worse than sitting at home all day on just the weekend, I couldn't do it all week as well.
Depends on the style of the space. IMO, hot-desks are an optional subset of co-working. I own a small building that we operate as a co-working space - a few small 1-2 person businesses in a mixture of open plan and private office spaces. I enjoy it.
Some of us need to get away from distracting kids at home, or have a shared space for client meetings, enjoy the friendships and banter, etc.
We rented a 2-person "private office" at a local coworking space in Seattle. Unfortunately we only lasted about a month before giving up and returning to our home office. The problem was, even though they called them "private offices", each office was only separated by a thin layer of glass which did not block any sound, and consequently you ended up hearing every conversation in every office adjacent to yours. This made it impossible to get any work done, especially since some of our neighbors happened to be on the phone all day as part of their work.
Ours are proper walls with two sheets of gyprock (which I think you call drywall). People also take as many phone calls as possible away from their desks in the meeting room or kitchen. I find that it works well for me.
For every minute I might lose being distracted by someone chatting, I gain back another time by feeling pushed to work. If I'm at home, it's too easy to get up looking for snacks to procrastinate.
I mostly love working in a coworking space, the one I'm in is something around 150-200 people.
I work in a small company (6 in the office, and 2 remote/roaming), and I think that working in a coworking space gives me the best parts of a larger company, and the best parts of a small company.
There are lots of social events and opportunities to hang out with other people in the space, we have different events and presentations on all the time. I also get all the nice parts of a smaller company, like knowing all my coworkers and the CEO personally, and a lack of office politics and a chain of command, I don't quite report directly to the CEO, but I am in regular direct contact with him.
Not everyone here is tech either, there's quite a few small non-tech startups and small businesses, which is great to get that contrast.
There are some disadvantages though. Some people are inconsiderate or ignorant of the fact that it is an open office and that you're sitting next to other people, and they have extend conversations, or phone calls (which are the worst, some people practically shout into their phone). We have dedicated noise dampened phone booths that work great, as well as meeting rooms and meeting booths for people that need to be loud, as well as a corner of the space that's for people that need to be noisy.
By and large the majority of people are fine though. Hot desking isn't too bad either, since most people are there every day, so everyone has a seat they usually sit in. I'm pretty minimalist too, so all I need is some paper and my laptop, I don't need external keyboards, mice, or monitors.
It's a great community, it sounds really cliche, but it's more than just a place to work at. It's a great community.
I might be tempted to try a coworking space, except that I live in a small town in the mountains of Central Arizona: no coworking spaces here!
I have a beautiful home office, nice views of red rocks and mountains, and I can deal with interruptions from my wife and pet parrot. Physically, my home office is about as good as the very best private offices provided by employers.
Sometimes some background random noise and activity is nice while working, in which case I go to the public work areas in the public library or a coffee shop.
Co-Founder of www.SwingSpace.com here: We recently launched with the goal to become the "kayak for coworking"--see top coworking options in Atlanta, Boston, DC & Chicago. We film every single one ourselves + show prices.
If I can be helpful email me at zak@swingspace.com
Cool - any plans to include European cities? Digital nomads would like to be able to look up the prices with ease. Also, as a Texan, I'd personally be interested in Dallas and Austin
Yes! We will be in DFW this year & our team is coming out to SXSW. Europe later. . . we're a small team right now and we literally fly out and canvas the community and go to all the co-working places ourselves--so it's a bit of a lift.
Noticed a local coworking space added a coffee bar and small brewery as well as a open mic platform area. From that it appears as though it's heading the reverse of where cafes ended up being co-working spaces from those sipping a latte for six hours.
Coworking spaces don't feel comfortable enough to even work at in the first place. It's as noisy as a coffee shop, but at least you have a desk you might not get the next day.
I really hoped that coworking spaces could help with the isolation I feel from working remotely. But they really haven't helped all that much. The challenge is that you're just going to a slightly more comfortable working space than a coffee shop to be around other people working with headphones in. You're not working with them, just around them.
I've done some work in coffee shops (but on my own personal projects), so I actually understand firsthand how this is a nice way to do some work. But I don't really understand the coworking space concept. It seems to be worse than the coffee shop, but for a lot more money.
With a coffee shop, it's basically free, except you need to buy some drinks and snacks to justify taking up space there for so long. Not a big expense, plus you need to eat anyway. Good coffee shops will even have nice sandwiches, so you can cover your lunch that way. Coworking spaces don't have readily-available food and drinks; you'll have to bring your own.
Coffee shops don't have people yakking away on the phone. A bunch of people in this discussion have complained about this being a problem with coworking spaces. Of course, if your job requires you to talk on the phone a lot, coffee shops are out and coworking spaces would make perfect sense, but my job doesn't.
So I don't really get it, unless you don't have a good coffee shop around that lets you camp out there for many hours a day.
The problem with "the middle of nowhere" is the lack of socialization available. That's why a lot of people move to cities, even though the cost is a lot more.
Sure, it's great if you can work remotely and afford a really nice place in the sticks. But lots of people here even complain about going "stir-crazy" from sitting at home too much. Even if you're married, you're going to get tired of only socializing with that one person all the time, and never having any outside friends. You'll also get tired of never having any activities to do which involve interacting with other people. In a city, you have all that available: lots of other people, groups for various interests, etc. In rural areas, all you have are the people who live there, and their values and lifestyles will be so diametrically opposed to yours that you won't be able to socialize with them at all. So if you're not into fundamentalist religion, guns, off-roading, etc., moving to the sticks will condemn you to a very lonely life. And if you're an ethnic minority, it could be downright dangerous.
We're working out of Acmeworks in the west end. It's not bad, great location and good company. However, it's a little expensive and the internet occasionally cuts out.
