I've personally found that I do not enjoy working from home. I think he hits the nail on the head with the "Crippling Depression" part. As a software engineer, I do my best work alone, in my head, but I need real-life interaction with my team for my work to feel meaningful.
I notice that most of the people in this thread talking about how they do successfully work from home talk about their wives and children.
Living alone and working alone sounds like a recipe for insanity. You've gotta have some time with other people, regardless of how much of an introvert you may be.
I've worked at home and lived alone for the past 5 years or so. I was still in college until a year and a half ago, so the lectures provided some socialization back then.
I don't think I've gone insane quite yet ;) Lots of IM and regularly making excuses to go be around people (meetup groups, running errands, working somewhere with people for a while) seems to be working for now.
Ditto, last year I worked from home for a few weeks a couple of times and it made my pre-existing depression measurably worse. As much as I like to work in my own head, it's going to be a long time before I could ever actually work alone again.
I don't do well working from home. I love the freedom that it provides, but that freedom is a double-edged sword. I'm definitely one with a 25 minute focus limit and the time between those good focus sessions tends to last a little too long.
I've also found that when working from home, I crave that social interaction. I'm in the creative business and some of the best ideas I've ever had have come through collaboration with coworkers.
I love the idea of working from home. I just don't know if it will ever work for me.
Personally, I think the depression is just a side effect of dealing with how society moulds you to work in an office. I have worked full time in an office twice, and I went through depression (unofficially, as I don't want anything to do with those drugs) for several months after leaving.
Offices desensitize employees to lots of distractions, which seem to become addictive: phones ringing non-stop, colleagues interrupting, clients visiting, random music playing in the background, fitting in with certain rules etc. The silence of working from home is refreshing at first, but then the dark clouds kick in and you start to adapt. Exercise is the best cure to depression.
Yes, this is true.
Sometimes you need to see emotional feedback to your work in order for it to feel worthwhile.
Just sitting at a computer ticking things off a todo list and occasionally pushing things to source control doesn't provide much satisfaction.
In the past I've succeeded in offsetting this (and staying connected with the team) by going into the office 1-2 days a week, and working from home the rest. I found it was a nice balance of autonomy and socialization.
Same here. I worked from home for a year and was going to go insane! It was a great feeling yet still very depressing. It doesn't help that I am single and live alone either though.
I recommend Sococo. I work for Sococo, but I use it too. Work from home, interact with people in WA, CA, AZ, MN - they're just over the virtual cubicle wall.
