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Comment by raamdev | Hacker News Reader

> I find it astonishing that startup indie devs pay out for an office, with all the extra bills that entails. Work from home, keep your overheads as close to zero as possible.

I've been a solo dev for nearly a decade (8 years) and I found that sometimes it makes complete sense to pay for an office. Before my daughter was born, I was able to work from almost anywhere: noisy cafes, at home, the library, etc. But after she was born it was like my brain needed a space away from home where I could close a door and have a room all to myself, a place where I couldn't hear family sounds or be within walking distance of anyone I knew. I tried cafes and libraries but, oddly, they no longer worked for me—the noise and the people walking by suddenly became a huge distraction. I couldn't focus. I decided to rent a tiny artist studio for $350/mo that I found on CraigsList and it was the best $350 that I spent each month in terms of direct impact on my ability to get work done.

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I kill two birds with one stone: my apartment is actually two in disguise. I have two front doors, one leading to a third of the apartment (it's a rather large 4-bed) which is quite literally closed off from the rest by simply locking the internal door that connects the two. It may sound silly to have to literally exit the apartment to enter the office when it's literally next door, but it does have some value. Also it makes it much easier for tax purposes. Consequently a third of my rent is paid by my company, because it rents it as office space. Maybe it sounds weird or immoral or whatever, but it truly is office space and 100% legit, it just happens to be I'm also the landlord.

I totally get it; I also need a separate space to switch mindsets.

Your setup reminds me of an article I read many years ago on these sorts of "tricks" to stay disciplined when working from home. One of the tips an individual used was to

  1. Walk out his front door
  2. Lock it
  3. Walk around the block
  4. Re-enter the house

And he was now in "work mode". At the end of the day, he reversed the process by walking around the block in the opposite direction in order to "get home".

Seemed quite brilliant to me at the time.

edit: Just noticed that enraged_camel engages this exact technique below.

I used to do something similar. Go out but to a coffee shop and do my emails and planning, then go home and start the real work. I just found it too hard to go straight from breakfast to working at home without some sort of routine to switch to a work state.

When I was working remote for 12 months I did the same kind of thing. I had the added extra of living alone as well.

It forced me to get up, shower, put clothes on, see some kind of sunlight, even have a tiny bit of face to face interaction with another human at the convenience store/cafe/sidewalk, and then get home, log in, and probably just procrastinate for an hour or so anyway - but at least I was clean and dressed.

What's enraged_camel?

HN member 'enraged_camel: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=enraged_camel

Your parent is referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14265636

I'm not sure about the US but here in New Zealand, even if you just work in a room in your usual home, you can claim that percent of your home's costs in your business expenses.[1] So I definitely wouldn't say you're doing anything immoral tax-wise.

[1] http://www.ird.govt.nz/business-income-tax/expenses/homebus-...

Yeah it's the same here in Sweden but its much less hassle audit wise to just show a separate unit with the company name on the door than a single room. Or at least, that's what my accountant told me, and the grapevine seemed to agree at the time I looked this up.

Yes, the US has the home business deduction.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p587/index.html

But most accountants suggest you don't take that deduction since they tend to be audited at a much higher rate.

I'm gonna call a hard citation please on "most accountants don't recommend" you taking a deduction that could get you a boatload of reduced tax liability.

Well I definitely got that recommendation too. His exact advice was that I shouldn't take it unless the office was it's own sealed off room that was NEVER used for ANY other purpose. He certainly scared me out of taking the deduction.

Agree, was told same. The requirements are strict and just not worth the hassle. Hope laws can be updated as working from home is more commonplace nowadays.

That's funny because turbotax always suggests this.

If you're scared about an audit, you shouldn't be in business.

I think many people use their home offices for other stuff than just work. Maybe it's a spare bedroom for guests or maybe they sometimes place computer games in it. If you get audited, you will have to explain all this. It won't be fun and if the audit doesn't go your way, you are looking at legal trouble.

Fear isn't the only reason to avoid one. They're also quite inconvenient.

I've been taking it for 15 years. I've never had a problem.

Same here in Belgium

This isn't really different than renting an office, just that your office is REALLY close to your apartment.

Also, really close to the fridge. Which helps on budget as well.

It's totally different in that you don't pay an extra rent. The office is just a room in the house with "which is quite literally closed off from the rest by simply locking the internal door that connects the two".

I'm assuming the rent for the double-apartment is greater than it would be for the single-apartment, so you are paying extra rent.

Tons of houses people already live in have an extra entrance or backdoor -- it's just a locked door between the other rooms. They could live in the same house and pay the same rent without using one room as a separate office -- as millions do.

Exactly, which is why it's also 100% legit.

Was it built as an inlaw suite or something? That sounds like a sweet setup.

I have no idea. It was built quite recently, in 2005 I think, and on the lease it just says "space available to let" or something like that. I've lived here since 2006 or so, but only recently started using the apartment like this. It's perfect!

A sweet suite if you will.

Oh, I will

I remember when I was looking to move houses a while back and we saw one WAY out in the boonies that was otherwise unremarkable but had a small, but physically separate "in-law house" in the back, that had a bedroom, a tiny kitchen (enough room for a fridge and microwave) and a tiny bathroom. We didn't move there but I couldn't stop thinking about how well something like that would fit as a work-from-home office. Currently, with a wife, a kid, and all her kid-friends, carrying on loudly and ransacking the house at all hours, I couldn't imagine making a "bedroom converted to office" work for actual productive remote work.

Too bad these in-law houses (or nanny houses) are so rare in the Bay Area. Where I used to live in Florida they were all over the place.

>Currently, with a wife, a kid, and all her kid-friends, carrying on loudly and ransacking the house at all hours, I couldn't imagine making a "bedroom converted to office" work for actual productive remote work.

I can't imagine making a setup like this work for even maintaining basic sanity. Every time I read a post like this, I realize I did the right thing by not having kids. I'm constantly stressed out as it is because of the open-plan office; if I had to come home to people "carrying on loudly and ransacking the house at all hours", I think I'd shoot myself. How people can live without a good amount of peace and quiet, I have no idea.

Your body will trick your mind to love your children. It happens often after the fact - I know it did. Humanity wouldn't survive if not. And I now find hard not to go ransacking the house with them ;)

You may love your children, but that doesn't mean you don't get stressed out by them. It's quite normal for parents to want to take time away from their kids, even having kid-free vacations without them as well as just "date nights". So obviously even people who aren't condemned to work in open offices and who have kids like some peace and quiet now and then.

That's a reason to have a separate office, not a reason to not have kids (if you'd otherwise want to have them.)

I can't have a separate office; I'm stuck with the office my employer provides me. I could go find another job of course, but it's going to be the same there, or worse, since all the employers have jumped on the open-plan office bandwagon.

At home is the only place I get a little peace and quiet, aside from my cats jumping in my lap. Kids would eliminate that.

I feel similarly.

Where I'm working at the moment, apart from the noise and distraction of an overcrowded open plan office, there are people in my face literally all the time due to meetings, questions, pairing, dealing with outages, and other miscellaneous interruptions. As an introvert this all becomes seriously draining so home is very much my escape.

I don't think I'm alone in this either - plenty of introverts in software, and I certainly didn't choose software as a career so I could sit around yakking to people all day. Quite the opposite in fact. (I may have made this observation in a comment on HN before, so apologies to anyone who may already have read it.)

The real downside of all this is that I often don't want to socialise with my friends or talk to my family outside of work because I'm basically peopled out and need some peace and quiet.

Add to this the fact that the work is boring and the commute is a gruelling 2.5 hour motorcycle roundtrip (>4 hours by car, due to traffic, or about 5 hours by public transport) and it's probably high time for me to find other work.

I am not seeking a conflict here, please note that -- but I don't think you should limit that phenomena to introverts.

I am a pretty outgoing and easy-to-make-friends-with person but I still hate working in offices and 6 or so years ago I fought tooth and nail to achieve it. I succeeded, at the cost of a relationship, very old animal friends, most of my "circle" and quite a bit of few other sacrifices.

My point here is that there are other things to have in mind when choosing between on-site and remote: I personally hate commuting. Even if it's 20 minutes from my door to the office, I still hate them. That's a time nobody pays me for, and a time during which I can't be with my loved one.

Add to this that we all know that no work day is like any other; there are days when you're worth $1 and there are days when you're worth $20,000.

Outgoing, extroverted, expressive, call it what you want -- but I want to work on my own terms. And I am times more productive ever since I work remote. (And yes I am in a very happy relationship.)

Find another job, please.

Even if you made less, not having to commute would make you feel better.

You called it: I could probably tolerate everything else were it not for that journey.

Are you in a relationship?

I was extremely fortunate to be able to get a house with a 'lab' over the garage. The previous owners had built it as a sort of 'party' room with a wet bar and a small toilet. Makes an excellent 'home' office.

I have also been working out of my garage for the last eight years and I'm just now in the process of finding an office. I don't have any kids, but I still feel like I'm going stir crazy.

Sometimes you just need to put some distance between where you sleep and where you work.

I work from home. Here's how I get around this: after waking up and having breakfast, I go for a short (~10 minute) walk or bike ride around the block. When I get back, I start working. That kind of "fake commute" is sufficient to trick my brain into separating work from everything else I do in the same space.

When you end the day, do you have a second fake commute home?

Makes more sense to just sleep at the office and commute home in the morning.

In my case, gym.

This actually does the trick. I go to a nearby coffee shop to get my coffee. It's like, changing context allows you to switch to "work mode".

This is my trick too. It works out nicely if you have a dog, then you can walk them at the same time.

My dog doesn't wake up that early.

Doesn't work for me. The moment I enter my house again, my brain immediately smells home (=rest) and I cannot work again.

This. The longer I 'work from home' the more I discover the importance of separate physical spaces for certain activities. If I spend enough time on entertainment in the same space that I work all day, over time working in that space seems to become more and more 'energetically mixed' (for lack of a better term) and it seems to get harder to focus on specific non-entertainment tasks. I now refuse to eat, sleep, or indulge in entertainment in the same space that I work. I don't even let myself read fiction books where I work. I try to do all deep thinking while walking outside, read fiction in bed before sleeping, and only work while standing at my desk.

I'd theorize that this has something to do with the fact that the hippocampus is implicated in both determining locational context (for navigation) as well as task management and executive function. I've read a bunch of books on the topic of willpower that indicate that decision-making is a fairly expensive on a metabolic level, so this makes sense to me -- it's like you're minimizing the array of actions from which your hippocampus has to scan when it determines what to work on from locational context.

When I worked from home I did something similar to what a previous poster has said. I would go to a cafe in the morning and work from there until lunch, I found I needed some humans around me for at least part of my morning to focus. Then after lunch I'd go home and work until 6 or so then go to the gym. Just doing this, the feeling of coming home from the gym, allowed me to have that mental space from work and home time.

I worked from home for 6 months and it was completely miserable. I have a small office at home and I tried really hard to see it as a separation from my "home", but I just couldn't focus in there. I could barley get work done knowing my bed and tv were just a few feet away. It was also really, really lonely.

I think the real lesson that's being conveyed is "Don't gear up like you're a successful business until you are a successful business".

> When your game sells and makes some money, treat it in terms of how many years you’ve got until you’d have to get a ‘proper job’

> I’d released three games before I went ‘full time’, and my 4th was just about ready to launch. The first games were made in my spare time while my Real Job paid for my food and rent, because honestly fuck starving yourself, fuck living on beans and worrying about rent. Go Full Indie when you can afford to Go Full Indie, and not before

If you're just starting out, making your first game in this case, it makes no sense to spend a ton on office space, designers, etc. You have no income yet... one step at a time sort-of-thing.

Too many people fall in love with the idea of running a business, but don't actually know what that really means. They run around organizing things, setting up office space, getting logo's designed by fancy marketing companies, hold meetings, etc... they do everything except figure out how to make money. They love the idea of being a business, but not the actual work that comes with that territory.

Wow that hits home. Been there, done that. Pro-tip, especially for Californians: If you're on a shoe string budget, don't go set up any kind of tax or business entity before you have revenue. Paying CA's $800 LLC tax and paying an accountant $400 to write "$0" on your tax return every year is a pointless waste of money. Ask me how I know.

But with a legitimate entity, you can deduct all kinds of legitimate business expenses to offset the minimum $800 tax. It's handy to write off the losses during your startup years. Doing business as a sole proprietor and filing losses is asking for an audit, which can be very time consuming. Doing the same as a legitimate business entity is far less likely to end up in an audit.

> They run around organizing things, setting up office space, getting logo's designed by fancy marketing companies, hold meetings, etc... they do everything except figure out how to make money.

I just heard an extremely similar message from Steve Martin in his Masterclass video series: "I was talking to some students and they were saying things like, 'how do I get an agent?', 'where do I get my headshots?' and I just thought... shouldn't the first thing you're thinking about be how do I be good?"

> ... they do everything except figure out how to make money. They love the idea of being a business, but not the actual work that comes with that territory.

We should call them "cargo cult businessmen".

$350/mo seems _extremely_ reasonable for a quiet studio. I don't think that's the kind of office expense the poster was talking about. For instance, in NYC, $350/month would barely get you a "hot desk" (i.e. chair at a table) in a coworking space.

I'm a solo dev, paying $550 AUD a month for a permanent desk at a great open plan tech community space. It's in an inner city suburb (Richmond) which is the tech hub of Melbourne, Australia.

I live about 22K out of town, in the green wedge with lots of trees. I like how I am still physically connected each day to the vibrant Melbourne tech community, but can come home to the family and be in a more open, natural space. I am so much more productive when I am in the office and it works well, when meeting clients, to have an address in town.

Best tax-deductible money I have ever spent.

Yes, but if you're self-funded every dollar is taken out of your "runway".

Or out of your profit, assuming you're making money. :)

Partially. It's a business expense, so at least you get to deduct it from your taxes.

The nearest WeWork to me in NYC charges $450/mo for a "hot desk" and $500/mo for a dedicated desk.

https://www.wework.com/buildings/w-43rd-st--new-york-city--N...

We pay $3000 a month for our startup for a small 3-4 person private office room in a shared space.

there are artist studios in east williamsburg that are about ~500. my buddy's even has fios.

> I tried cafes and libraries but, oddly, they no longer worked for me—the noise and the people walking by suddenly became a huge distraction.

I see that issue with cafés, but I never had such an issue with libraries. At least the libraries I know are very quiet and their staff takes great care to keep it quiet.

My problem with the library was that on some days, I needed to phone quite often, or was called quite often. Each time I had to leave the library temporarily, and this in-and-out was very annoying for me.

> rent a tiny artist studio for $350/mo

Wow, that's still quite a lot. Did you try co-working spaces? Roughly speaking, there you pay for a desk in a room, not for a whole appartment.

The coworking spaces nearest me are priced at 250$/seat /month for the lowest level plan and I am in a cheaper city than most.

That doesn't include a desk that's yours, just that you can come in every day and use the space.

Your own desk starts at the price point for his office.

If your goal is peace and quiet, I would argue his studio is money well spent.

Source:http://www.804rva.com/memberships.html

I first thought that this is quite expensive (250$ are roughly 230€), but then I had a look at local offers here in Berlin. Here it is 210€/month, so only slightly cheaper. However, you can get a cheaper place if you use it only part-time.

Source: https://members.co-up.de/

Ditto, I worked from home for 7 years before my daughter came along. The last two years I've been at an office are the most profitable two years I've eved had. Also, when I go home, I'm 100% present with my family not distracted about getting more work done.

>I've been a solo dev for nearly a decade (8 years) and I found that sometimes it makes complete sense to pay for an office. Before my daughter was born, I was able to work from almost anywhere: noisy cafes, at home, the library, etc. But after she was born it was like my brain needed a space away from home where I could close a door and have a room all to myself, a place where I couldn't hear family sounds or be within walking distance of anyone I knew.

Or you could invest in some sound insulation and a good lock.

You can get shared space in a WeWork for about $350/month. Includes coffee, water, great internet, and if you're like me and enjoy interacting with humans, it does the trick. This is my preferred situation these days. Plus, when you travel, you can use WeWorks around the world (for a nominal fee).

I even made a video about it: https://youtu.be/912WN4gUBCs

Edit: I'm not affiliated with WeWork (aside from being a customer). I just like their business.

My experience with coworking spaces in NYC (specifically WeWork and Coworkrs) is that there's very little in the way of peace and quiet there--especially at the lowest price point. If you need to take calls, too bad. It's like trying to work out of a frat house most of the time.

It's probably totally fine for certain types of work, but for me it wasn't a good place when you had to really focus on solving problems and writing code. Way too many distractions.

Indeed, it's the equivalent of working in an "open floor plan" office.

I rent an office with a buddy in the NY metro area for about $350 each, its about a 6 minute walk from my apt. Best investment I could make, if I only work a few extra hours a week because of it then it pays for itself. Thats just me tho some people are fine working from home.

Same here. I started renting an office this month after about 10 years of working from home. Same reason: family is growing and the apartment is not large enough to isolate me well enough.

I totally understand you, you basically described what the book I am reading now: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain.

It also explains the cons about these brand new "wide noise open offices" that companies are building today.

I've waffled on office location several times. My equilibrium is "home office first", use WeWork or shared office spaces for one-day to meet with clients, and use AirBnB for #DigitalNomad "workations".

Agreed. Starting a company (6 months in) - it's hard to work from home. Worth the money to have an office and not only that but the routine.

Hmm, I'm starting to notice this too (I have a ~3 year old) and it kind of worries me. Aging brain I guess.

Library?

> I tried cafes and libraries but, oddly, they no longer worked for me—the noise and the people walking by suddenly became a huge distraction.

For me, the reason is different. I don't mind people walking or even talking nearby, but I really hate the process of pack/unpack. Before work, I need to setup the laptop, the cables, the IP to access my local server from Android, get notebooks, pens, ohh my earphones, and a lot more, only then I can jump to work for maybe 2-3 hours (I feel a little uneasy to stay longer in the cafe). If you are working alone, the bathroom is more complicated. Oh and the outlet. And internet... It doesn't work for me. Office is my only option, because I want everything ready to start immediately.

Me too. I tried the library but it took too much effort to setup and tear down every time I needed to move (such as restroom break, lunch, quick break). Also, it would be impossible to have access to a nice large monitor.

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