Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health
For the last 2.5 years I've been working at DigitalOcean as a remote employee. DO has more than 50% of the staff remote. I think it's important that a large chunk of a company & team be remote, to be successful in the exercise, so that there be a forcing function to use asynchronous communications. It's been really life changing for me.<p>We have a bunch of style of remotees; work from home, work from coffeeshop, work from coworking spaces and work from a new place every day.<p>I've tried all of these styles, starting with work from home, then getting super depressive from loneliness and getting a coworking space (DO pays for it), then realizing I didn't use it and instead working from a mix of home, coffeeshop, and random visits I pay to my friends. And now I've been switching to mostly working from the crazyest settings I can think of. I worked from camping spots, from a sailboat, in a national park, on a beach in Asia, and it all works out once you're used to "travelling from anywhere".<p>I'm having the best time of my life by experimenting with what it really means when your ability to feed is now decoupled from your physical location. I feel like I'm living in a future that maybe more of the people will have the chance to live soon, and that it's my duty to find a "Theory of Working In The Future". My first theorem is "Don't stay home everyday else you shall go crazy".<p>Also, think about the implications of OneWeb and the constellation that SpaceX has been working on; I'm thinking "what if I could get low latency/high bandwidth internet from the middle of any ocean"? The future looks bright.<p>[edit]: just realized I'm kind of praising my employer a lot here. My comment isn't meant as recruiting spam, tho I think DO's great to remote folks. Also we're building massive distributed systems everyday and it's fun. So uh... check this out? <a href="http://grnh.se/wv3fgo" rel="nofollow">http://grnh.se/wv3fgo</a>