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.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.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".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".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.[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? http://grnh.se/wv3fgo