NYT: They're Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side

I like the idea, but I have rather odd habbits when I'm writing. I don't think many people can stand listening to one album 4 times while I'm completely zoned out from the music and haven't noticed it's stuck on loop in iTunes. I think the worst was when my girlfriend sent me a song, by the time I looked back into iTunes it said it had played 17 times, which was just about an hour.

So I'll probably just go with the age old, convert a bedroom into an in-house office and do my socialising after hours.

I tried a co-working site a couple times. It beats sitting in Starbucks or the local coffee shop (with free AC outlets and wi-fi) with a bunch of strangers - instead you are with your peers. And in a co-working space you don't feel like you have to subsidize your stay with strategically timed-out coffee purchases. Also, a nice thing is you can go out to lunch and leave your laptop there (it's secure). The 'can you watch my laptop' when you have to use the bathroom in a Starbucks-type environment (too much coffee subsidization) is always a little sketchy and feels imposing.

The weird thing about co-working is that it's like study hall - because other people are working - you feel the pressure to work as well - to not slack - or maybe not study hall but cram session before finals in a college library. So even though the music may be playing loud in the background, there isn't really a lot of networking going on - everyone's busy with their own gig. So you might actually get more interaction in an office setting - in my experience there's not a lot of small talk. Just queries like 'Dave - can you help me debug this [XHTML layout]?'

As a corporate worker bee programmer, I admire yet just got sorta jealous at the co-workers there who make a good living designing Wordpress/XHTML/Drupal (e.g. non-nitty gritty technical) sites for businesses.

Co-working is a powerful idea (like unionizing indie developers). I think it depends on the work style/personality of the individual. E.g. if you twitter multiple times daily, you're probably a good candidate.