I've been renting at a co-working space for the past few months, in the city I'm currently parked in (Fertilab in Springfield, OR). It's actually not so bad. Kinda like a coffee shop, only everyone else is also working. I'm historically very much opposed to open offices, but if there aren't phones ringing, and there's not a lot of "hey, can I ask you about X?" cross-talk, it's not so bad.
I've turned down jobs in the past because they were in open offices, and I might still do so today. I basically agree with you that it's a bad idea to work full-time in an open office. But, for a three days a week kinda work place, just for a change of pace and an excuse to take a walk out of my house, it's been really nice. I plan to start checking for co-working spaces when I first get to a new city. It gives me some much-needed variety in my work day, gets me communicating with other people in tech in the city I'm in, and provides some other benefits (some of those benefits: there are distractions but they're different than at home and at coffee shops, the internet is faster than my home internet or most coffee shop WiFi though this may not be true for everyone, quieter than coffee shops, not home so I can fixate on work and not whether dishes or laundry needs doing, etc.).
I'd like to visit Paris one of these days, maybe once my French is stronger. I could see signing up for this for a while.
I like the social part of talking to random people but in startupland there are much more wannabes that real entrepreneurs, so at the end the conversations are very naive. And with entrepreneurs I mean people who can build a real business not the next Facebook.
Yes, that's one of the negatives, probably. I kinda like where I am now, though, as most of the people working out of this space are not "startup entrepreneurs", they're small business owners. The Eugene location might be different, since there's more of a tech scene there, but the folks in this branch are pretty no-nonsense, just here to get some work done, not try to sell me on their poorly thought out, poorly researched, derivative ideas.
That said, I also spent some time at the ATX Hackerspace which did have a bunch of startuppy types, and it was mostly free of bullshit, too, because so much of the focus there was on the hacking and not the "I just need to raise $x million and this thing's gonna explode!" mindset. So, conversation in that space were about laser CNCs, 3D printing, and electric cars, rather than everybody trying to give their (too-long) elevator pitch to as many people as possible.
Interesting, if different groups who don't know themselves are seriously motivated and working it might end up "as" quiet as a library. Unlike one company's open space where everybody tries to talk to everyboyd and compete for spots.
Also, 90% chance the English will be sub-standard (just to clarify, I am a 36 year-old Frenchman and I know for a fact that my average fellow citizen's command of the English language is rather poor).
It is, especially when you get the inevitable few people who think the rule about working quietly doesn't apply to them
I have a private office now and, amazingly, it costs no more. But the irony is that I only found out about it through someone I'd met in the previous open office.
