What If You Combined Co-Working And Daycare? | Hacker News Reader

What If You Combined Co-Working And Daycare?

fastcompany.com

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I've actually been working out of this space for the past few weeks. Don't have kids but I see everyday how amazing it is for all the people who work there who do. The daycare is sectioned off so there isn't a whole lot of noise or distractions from the kids.

If you're based out of SF, freelance / work remotely, and have kids, I think this is a fantastic setup.

The fact that the kids are separate from the work area should have been outlined clearly in the article. After reading the headline and the text, my thoughts were "this sounds horrible and I'd want to jump off a bridge if I worked there."

Now that I know the kids are kept away from the work environment, I can definitely see the benefits. Who watches over the kids while they're in the daycare? A rotating schedule between the parents?

Hah yeah, if the work & daycare sections weren't separate, I would've jumped off a bridge too!

Re: watching over kids: it's like a regular daycare, so they have dedicated staff to take care of the kids. (Which also means the daycare costs extra, on top of the fees for the co-working space itself.)

Are there significant advantages over just picking a childcare facility close to your place of work? Obviously distance comes into it, but I feel that otherwise you're potentially picking the best combo-childcare-workspace rather than the best childcare facility and best workspace.

When I first started reading the article, I thought they were going to suggest working from home with the child around your legs. Ha! Good luck with that!

Presumably it means you can see your child in a five-minute coffee break several times in the work day, and feel less like you're shipping your child off for other people to take care of most of the waking day.

I never did that, but I have known people who have had their children in day care centers close by, and were happy to have them there, may have looked in at lunch, etc.

On the other hand, I knew a woman with an office right upstairs from the rooms where our children were; she got fed up with the management and moved her daughter to another facility--not very far, but not lunchtime walking distance.

The proximity alone is a huge advantage. And I would think that the parents are more organized (ie they all work in the same office) would be beneficial. Above some minimum bar, I'm not sure what the "best" looks like (for <= 36 months).

We compared a few childcare places and while all seemed adequate, the one we went with has a kitchen with some instructional component (e.g., children often see how the food is prepared and get some practice), chickens and vegetable garden, has orchestra-level musicians visit for music days, etc. It's a purpose built facility rather than a retro-fitted house too.

My child is there only two days a week, so I have no issue with not being able to drop in to play during lunch breaks.

How much is the daycare? I thin it ear that they do want parents to spend an hour per week in the daycare? Hard to find information about it.

Looking at the photos it doesn't seem there is a lot of privacy unless you permanently camp out in a conference room. I'm on the phone pretty much all the time, would this not be a good fit, for when I'm in SF?

This is a failing of most coworking spaces in SF, and I imagine its a question purely of economics. I'd like to see (or hey, get funding to start) an open plan office that at least has the option of high-wall cubicles. I also think there's a bit of a gold rush in that commercial real estate owners figure they can just take a big open room and throw a bunch of tables down and charge everybody $300/mo to huddle together.

However, there are also several hackerspaces that have woodshops and whatnot, so it seems like a short hop to think that if computery people can work as part of a multidisciplinary office next to a bandsaw, why not work alongside daycare workers? Maybe there are some legal issues in sharing in this way, but by splitting a big open office into a daycare side of a wall and an internet one, maybe there's a way.

I wonder how a landlord in SF would feel about using a residential address as a shared office: much more affordable than downtown real estate and maybe the bonus of a garden for the summer. I expect that happens a lot unofficially..

Landlords don't care but the neighbors and the city might

Uh...residential real estate is hardly "much more affordable" in SF. In fact, office space in soma is likely still cheaper than residential here (not sure why you'd want to be downtown). Also, probably illegal if not zoned for commercial

Well, there are a few folks who are on the phone quite a bit, but if you need privacy this is not the best setup. There is a small "phone room" with a desk and a door, but just the one.

However, I believe some of the other co-working spaces in SF (including the other NextSpace ones further into the city) have multiple phone booths so you may want to check those out. Drop-in cost for most spaces tends to be about $20 - $25/day.

My wife and I both work full time in demanding jobs, and we have a 4-month old.

I'm in the process of setting up a business with a friend for pretty much one reason - we want to work full time and be close to our kids. Part of the plan involves either having a daycare section in our workplace, or our workplace being a couple of minutes walk from our daycare.

It's 2014, I want to be able to play with my son during my coffee breaks and lunch. And I'm sure as hell not dumping the responsibility for my kid on my wife..

I solved this by getting more wives.

Seems counter-intuitive... but it just might work.

I'm struggling to keep one wife happy. You must be crazy! :)

Having your own business is much more demanding than a full-time job.

that's bullshit. Having your own business lets you decide yourself how much you work. You can spend 80 hours a week on your business, or you can spend 30 hours a week on your business. I chose the latter, and it works just fine. (but I don't have any employees, maybe that would change things)

On top of that, I have the freedom to just stay at home and take the kids to the zoo when I don't feel like working.

Having employees make the difference. If you don't have employees you're more or less like a freelancer, which is significantly different from carrying the responsibility for a whole bunch of people.

I employ between 5 and 12 people depending on my workload. I just don't have to provide an office because they're all remote.

Depends on what you call a business. A business can be a bakery or an international software publisher.

You're right when you hint that having employees might change everything: it does.

Don't forget that remote work also exists when being employed so I would not say flexibility is "be your own boss" related.

Exactly. We're going down the Freelance/Consultant route whilst working on our own products in the downtime, growing those products until they outpace the consultancy.

We'll use a shared platform for the products which will allow us to amortize the development costs over all of the products. Hopefully we can grow them to the point where we can hire people to manage the products day-to-day whilst we focus on new ventures.

We've got an end-game in mind, which involves leveraging the fact that a vast swathe of industries have only scratched the surface of what is possible with automation. "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King".

But I'm getting ahead of myself now :)

Not necessarily. Having your own business might take the same number of hours as a full-time job, but you have much less commute time. Also you can decide when to work a lot of the time.

If you set things up right, sometimes you don't have to work at all.

The old adage "work smart, not hard" has become trite and meaningless, and when I first started out in business I thought it was scammy bullshit.

But now I work 3 days per week and take care of my kids every Tuesday and Thursday. I work from home and see them all the time. Sure I don't make much money but we get by and I'd rather live on less money now while I watch my kids grow up than spend all my time working.

I guess what having your own business gives you more than anything is choice: choice about when and how you work, choice about who you work with and choice about how much money you want to make.

Even if you can find this sort of daycare setup, good luck getting your kid into it. My building (federal building in Philadelphia) has one, and we're still on the waiting list 5 months into my job, and almost a year after applying. Several law firms and agencies in D.C. have on-site day cares, but you need to sign up probably two years in advance.

There was a place that did this in Menlo Park/Mountain View a few years ago called Cubes & Crayons. They really tried to make it work, but ended up having a lot of problems and eventually threw in the towel. Their daycare was decent, but the office side of things didn't cut the mustard.

And that, I think is the problem with the business model. It's hard to make both the day care, and the office space work, and one side is probably going to suffer. Do you focus on the day care, which is a larger market, but has high turnover (kids grow up fast), or do you focus on the smaller flex office space where you can potentially hook people for longer? The flex office space might not be a good idea because many people might just work from home instead, and are really just looking for someplace to park their kids for a few hours so they can get some work done. Cap that off with having to follow additional regulations around running a child care facility, and it makes for a pretty tough business.

Right now I'm a dad who works in a similar situation, with a few notable exceptions (my 'coworkers' are my dog and cat, and the person taking care of my daughter while I'm working is my wife).

In my opinion, one of the major advantages of working from home is that when I want to take a break, I get to go hang out with my daughter. I really wouldn't want to trade that for anything... The downside to our arrangement is that my wife is very limited in what she can do, career-wise. A space like this would open up a huge number of alternatives for us, with very few tradeoffs (aside from the cost, which is conspicuously absent from the article...)

Wait until your daughter learns to come and knock on the office/study door and call out for you!

Have your office in the second floor, with a trap door (at the entrance) that opens into a slide that delivers the child (or spouse) back to the first floor.

There's some wonderfully hilarious imagery in that sentence.

Heh, I'm hoping that by the time she has the strength and dexterity to open the gate at the bottom of the stairs that she'll also have the cognitive ability to understand "Daddy's working".

Mine has both... (At two.) it's v difficult to deal with "not work, daddy, come play. Come play!"

I get the knocking at the door plus "Daddy. Daddy." My wife taught our 18 month old to do just that. It's sweet, but completely distracting and disruptive to the point where on days I could have worked at home, I need to head into the office to get any flow going.

Your wife could work from home as well, or you could take part-time job.

Major reason for my start-up was to work from home. Sometimes when there is emergency meeting, outside of office hours, I have baby on my lap while video conferencing. Most people tolerate it if she is not crying.

> Your wife could work from home as well, or you could take part-time job.

My full time job is what brings enough money into the household to allow for us both to be home. She does work from home (she has a dozen or so piano and voice students in the evening when I'm available to watch our daughter), but it would be pretty tough for her to actually use her degree and teach full-time in a K-12 classroom.

I think a daycare that's close enough to mom that she can go nurse her child 2 or 3 times a day is going to be a simpler solution. Nursing is the crux problem. I'm a dad, but I have never heard any mother speak kindly about pumping. It's a huge logistic pain, and quite unpleasant for most moms.

How is that simpler? It's still quite a delay to get from office to daycare, and wasted time traveling back and forth.

Nursing is a big problem/benefit, but far from the only one. There are a lot of other problems that can require a parent's personal attention for a few minutes, and having an essentially zero commute time would greatly simplify dealing with those. And spending a 10 minute break playing with the kids can at times be much more refreshing than anything you can do at a normal corporate site.

More reason that the medical profession's highly misleading rhetoric about the benefits of breast feeding do a huge disservice to parents: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-21/lifestyle/sc-h...; http://www.skepticalob.com/2013/05/world-health-organization....

Life is enormously simpler when the baby can be fed by either the father or a daycare worker.

I hope to see more innovations like this pop up as our "demographic" starts shifting away from the 20 somethings and into the 30 somethings.

There's a whole new breed of ca. 19 year olds with macbook airs who use javascript and mongo and don't know what syscalls are, and they outnumber us five to one. I wouldn't hold my breath.

17 y.o. here (no MacBook, and no MongoDB for now mind-you); I'm very excited for possible innovation in parenting, and I hope there's at least a healthy subset in the HN community sharing that interest.

The coffee shop kids will keep coming though I guess, maybe we could find a way to get them on track while we wait for the first batch to mature.

I was gonna guess that you also must know about syscalls, but judging by your username maybe you're more into message passing. ;)

It was a phase, multiprocess debugging is every shade of hell on one rainbow with a pot of self loathing at the end.

I changed my IRC nick to microcode after microcolonel, unfortunately HN doesn't afford that luxury.

P.S. Most message passing APIs require some system calls, nay?

U.S. generations aren't growing in size, so no they don't.

The number of programmers per capita per generation today is much higher, so yes they do.

It would be better if they didn't miss the point of being close to your kids, which is... you know... to interact with and nurture them directly.

In Seattle, http://elliescoworking.com/ -- I know it received lots of interest and support a few years back when it was first being tested. It looks like this may have transitioned away from childcare for the time being into http://www.worksprogressseattle.com/ Jessie is extremely friendly and I'm sure has quite a bit to say about her experience.

I hope that this materializes. I work from home in Tacoma and send my son to daycare but I would take us both to Seattle on the Sounder train for the day if I could work next to his daycare.

I worked from worksprogress for a few months when I first moved to Seattle, good space and location and Jessie and Marnee are great.

In talking with them about the childcare side of things, they ran into a lot of regulation that just proved too much at the time.

Childcare is highly regulated and childcare and workplaces even more so apparently. They said that many of the laws they were running into were meant to keep larger industrial organizations in check back in the day. Companies used to offer very sub-par "childcare" for line-workers and if a child was having a problem (sick, injury, etc) it wasn't in the best interest of the company to inform the parent (who would have to leave the production line).

I didn't think those laws would apply to a co-op type office where everyone is working for themselves.

When I left in December, there was no childcare running, just the co-op workspace (which I would highly recommend).

If I was going to build such a building, I think I would base it off the early education training rooms that schools like NDSU have. They have one way mirrors and observation rooms. I would assume any workable suggestion needs a staff or else it would be chaos given different children's schedules. Also, it would be a pain for the children.

Employee memberships could be an interesting option for companies that aren't set up to do on-site daycare and willing to have remote-ish people.

We had one of those in Atlanta for a couple of years, but it appears to have changed owners and become a regular preschool a year ago. I don't see a post-mortem on the web.

[ http://john.do/bean-work-play-cafe/ ]

I have read that having a company daycare makes attaining insurance difficult. You are bringing on a large liability by having children on the property, and insurance rates will reflect that. The concept sounds nice but there are significant financial risks.

My son is 9 months old, and I take care of him two days a week while his mom goes to work. I've solved the problem in a way, by working long hours and in the weekends. In time we'll see if it's worth it. The kids are only kids once. I have two other kids from a previous marriage, the oldest recently began studying at the university. He seems to like spending time going to cafe's with me, so it's still not to late to catch up.

I couldn't find much pricing info. Anyone know?

In case it helps: I work here on a monthly "cafe plan" for $325/mo, which means I can take any available seat in an open "cafe" area. A dedicated desk is $525/mo. Full pricing for this location is here: http://nextspace.us/nextspace-potrero-hill/

Daycare costs extra, but unfortunately I don't know how much (I don't use the daycare facility), and it doesn't seem to be on their website either. My guess though is that it'd be comparable to other daycare places in SF, so basically another $1000-$1500/mo?

For full time day care? That's awesome. I (we) pay that for 2 days/week here.

This is a great idea for folks in urban spaces.

We live in the suburbs and did something similar for about a year. My wife and I both work from home full time, and when our second daughter was born, we had an in-home nanny take care of her for the first year.

We could take regular breaks during the day to visit with her, check in with the nanny, and help out with a feeding or two.

Quite up for scoping and seeing if we could set up one of these in London, if anyone else is interested....

i think a co-working + daycare space is a great idea. i've seen entrepreneurs try building product while staying home with their kids and it's very difficult to get into the 'zone' (and not feel riddled with guilt over it).

one model that i tried with my former CTO, who had a baby while we were working on a product, was to take turns watching the baby while coding.

/disaster

Having a Kindergarten at your workplace was quite common in the GDR. Sadly this wasn't adopted in West Germany.

Then you'd have a "no-working" space.

Why? Many companies have on site daycare. It helps parents who need to commute by saving them a trip and the stress of arriving late to daycare on the way home.

Clever pun though.

"Clever pun though"

And that's all it was intended to be ...

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