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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

This has been my life for years except without the “renting a place” part. I work in cafes. I work in parks. I work sitting on a bench taking shelter from the rain on my way to somewhere else. I work anywhere I have space to take my Wacom tablet out of my bag and plug it into my laptop, and the desire to spend more time working today.

I also work at home in my studio but getting away from the distractions of home is, as this article notes, important.

I thought “remote work” already meant this? I’ve been doing it for years, it’s one of the perks of being a freelance artist. Sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of getting together with some friends and splitting the rent on a shared studio space but really I know I’d only show up a few days a month.

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I wouldn't mind working in a different place than at home, but I've grown accustomed to having a 27" screen, and having to switch to using just the 13" screen of my work laptop would drive me bonkers. Perhaps one day when rollable monitors are a common thing and I can carry a 27" scroll screen in a poster tube...

hence renting a space in a coworking office where you can either leave your own monitor or rent one

yeah all you people who Absolutely Require a giant screen, or multiple ones, are stuck at desks. Me, I like plugging my laptop into the 24" screen on my desk, but I also like sitting out in a park with birds and cicada singing, so I've got my tools set up for both ways.

I'm guessing you are young and have better eyesight than me. :)

When I was young, I carried a little subnotebook with a 7.1" screen and really enjoyed it. Now I have to hold my phone at a certain exact distance, too close and it's burry, too far and it's blurry. I had to use the 13" work laptop for a few weeks without an external monitor and it was painful, the screen was small enough that I have to lean in to see the text, but then I am too close and so I have to squint. I could crank up the font size, but then the screen doesn't show very much. Having the 27" external monitor means that I can sit at a comfortable distance and crank the magnification up so that everything is legible.

Be careful. One day, this might happen to you too. :D

I am nearly fifty. :)

I'm also an artist, not a programmer, so I don't need to fill my screen with a ton of text. Plus my tools are pretty much designed around regularly zooming in and out.

While I do use a large second screen, often, I don't need it all the time.

I don't need it when cleaning my inbox. Or planning a sprint. I don't need it when conferencing. Or when designing an architecture. I don't need it when reviewing PRs, stepping through a debugger, poring through logs, deploying, running ansible or finding what config made that deploy fail.

I split my time as such. I can work on my laptop for a morning, then go home and plug into my large screen just fine. It actually helps me focus: multi-monitor = coding. Laptop only = other work.

> [...] I don't need it when reviewing PRs, stepping through a debugger, poring through logs, deploying, running ansible or finding what config made that deploy fail. [...]

Interesting how people work different. Would not like to dig through logs without 2 monitors (allows to have 4 different logs open). Same with debugging (having multiple source positions visible). Or deploying (watching logs/deployment progress). Reviewing PR (having spec side-by-side with code).

It could not imagine any task I could do in a park (besides playing with a dog ;) )...

I have a big screen laptop that has a full 10-key keyboard layout so it's workable anywhere. I also have a few tools that let me use the keyboard for 99% of actions I need for work.

But admittedly I also don't work long stints at once. If I had to work a few hours in a row my neck would protest and my eyes would concede defeat.

Pass on the cicada, but ya I'll take a park.

> I thought “remote work” already meant this?

Like anything, it's a spectrum. To some people, "travel" means "I drove to the next state over for the afternoon," and to some it means "I am going to this island down by Antarctica that requires getting a special government permit".

As long as the work gets done, why does it matter?

I agree!

I have considered this but it seems too inconvenient. A cafe doesn’t seem like a great place to work unless it’s consistently quiet and mostly empty so you aren’t taking a table an actual customer could have. The library seems like the next best place after home but it doesn’t seem to provide a whole lot of value over just working from home since I have a pretty good setup there.

Currently my current and ideal situation is working from home 3-4 days a week and then coming in at the end of the week. Those in office days might be less productive but they do provide enough social interaction for the week.

I worked remotely in 2011 while in Vancouver on a Working Holiday visa. While watching the sunset at English Bay, I met a Starbucks barista who had 5 free drinks per shift and was willing to give some to me. Sure enough, I now had a café-office!

Finding a nice desk with good WiFi, power socket, and a view was always challenging. Outside isn't ideal because of lacking WiFi/power socket. Free WiFi in backpacker hostels is sometimes limited to a few hundred MB. The Apple Store has a fast connection, but blocks everything that's not port 80 (which means no connecting to our SQL database on Amazon RDS). University WiFi worked well, thanks to a friend's eduroam.

Libraries are wonderful, but need to have longer opening hours in Western countries. The KHOP prayer room in Kaohsiung was excellent.

I wish there were a place I could go after work that isn't the office or my room. As it is, I get a lot done while sitting on a bus, but WiFi, power, and a view would make that much more pleasant.

> Sometimes I’ve toyed with the idea of getting together with some friends and splitting the rent on a shared studio space but really I know I’d only show up a few days a month.

I am the same. I actually do rent a "hot desk" at a co-working space and I use it barely once a month.

I have probably used it more for a private bathroom in the city centre than for the desk.

The original goal was just to get me out of the house and an excuse to get into the city for a wander. But I almost always choose to actually work in the gardens or at a cafe en-route. I keep renting it because it is pretty cheap and is entirely tax deductable for me, and on occasion it has proven invaluable (rain, cold, noisy at home, need to work for more than a few hours in a row and need the commitment device etc).

Now that you can sit in inside spaces without a mask, I feel libraries and cafes are a real alternative for me! And this is me typing from a desk at a public library 10 minutes from my apartment. Can't express the amount of relief and joy I feel right now

ooh, thanks for reminding me about libraries, I got a lot of work done upstairs in the main branch of Seattle's library, I gotta get around to checking out the options in my new city.

In some libraries I've worked from, they even offer small private rooms and meeting rooms you can reserve for video calls or in-person meetings.

> I thought “remote work” already meant this?

I think since most people's taste of remote work happened during COVID, so home was the only acceptable remote work place.

very much this, I'm a very restless person and I _need_ to move every 2-3 hours. Cafe hopping is very very important to my general flow. I also need noise and general life happening around me. Offices are too artificial an environment and my apartment is too silent.

also you need regular targets for your bowel disruptor gun, I am sure :)

Blues Bars for me. It may be strange, but I get a table in the corner, tell the bar tender to keep the coke and lime coming and my programming just flows with the music.

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