Working at Knackeriet – Old Town co-working location
Let me start by saying that I truly love the Stockholm web scene. So many talented and dedicated people, a bunch of great start-ups and a load of things going on.
When I started Geek Meet in 2006, it was to get the chance for web developers, especially with a front-end focus/interest, to hang out, discuss technology and the web. It’s been a great journey for me, I’ve gotten to know a ton of fantastic people and learn from, and I will continue to arange that for as long as I can.
Nowadays there are lots of great meetups in Stockholm, and I know the people who arrange most of the interesting ones. And there’s no competitive spirit, just a friendly atmosphere where people want to share knowledge, make friends and just have a good time. And I’d like to hope that I was part of setting that bar with Geek Meet, how we should be open, encouraging and sharing.
The next step
In my role working for Mozilla, I’m a remote employee. This means that I work from wherever and whenever I am – as long as I have a laptop and an Internet connection, I can work. This is the life I’ve been leading for the past few years, and most of the time I’ve been working from home – when I haven’t been traveling.
I’ve been contemplating how to get a better day-to-day basis for my work, to meet people, get inspired, bounce ideas. While I do enjoy working from home and am very effective when I do that, the social part definitely shouldn’t be underestimated.
So I’ve been considering options that would make sense, to make my daily live richer and would offer both the social and inspiration parts in one package – basically, an environment that I would thrive in.
Introducing Knackeriet
All this leads to an amazing co-working location in Old Town in Stockholm, Knackeriet. Run by serial web entreprenur Ted Valentin, it is full of very smart, driven and ambitious people, in a very friendly and welcoming setting.
For me it’s very inspiring and motivating to be around great people doing great things!
Ted and I have been talking a bit, and we both want and believe it would be very nice to have lunch presentations and discussions at Knackeriet, hanging out, sharing skills and much more!
Therefore, if you’re in Old Town in Stockholm, I hope you’ll be able to drop by, and we hope we can arrange a number of casual and inspiring meetups here!
As of now, I can’t imagine myself working from home, my past attempts were unsuccessful and I really value that communication channel you get when you’re in the same room with your coworkers.
You’ve been at Mozilla (meaning remote work) for quite a while and I’d love to hear your story – how do you manage to be productive while working remotely and stay connected with your colleagues? Was it a struggle in the beginning?
Dmitry,
I think there are pros and cons with working from home, and they depend a lot on your personality. For me, I generally work more effectively at home. More focused, less distractions.
Working in an environment with other people, though, you get the invaluable social bit, being able to talk about or discuss possible solutions and more.
So I’d say both approaches can be good, depending on the context.
Then, while working remotely usually works well, of course there are times when you know that things could be solved quicker by just sitting down in one room, rather than sending an e-mail and waiting for someone at the other end of the world to wake up, or schedule a video meeting or similar.
That’s precisely what my concern is. I used to work remotely and found that this lack of “realtime” access to people really slowed things down frequently. Of course that doesn’t mean that, when in the same room with your colleagues, you take over their attention for hours and block them from doing their job, but there’s usually very little cost in occasionally exchanging a couple of phrases to solve a micro-question with a person sitting next to you or take a quick look at their screen and give some feedback without raising an issue in the tracker. And most of the time, when you observe a person, you can kind of tell if they’re deep in their coding/debugging spree or taking a short break, so you’re able to pick a good moment for communication.
I’m not trying to say though that remote coworking is doomed to be ineffective, I know there are plenty of remarkable examples like Mozilla, Github and other great companies that are almost entirely virtual. I’m just curious to find out how you guys actually do it, how do you compensate for the weaker communication channel? Do you use chat? Do you make voice/video calls often?
Right, there are always those challenges. In general, we have a number of video calls per week, use IRC, e-mail, Twitter and any other approach that helps us. Basically, there are no specific rules. but those things are quite important to make it work.
I believe face time is always very important, so if you can’t meet in person, a quick video call might just be sufficient. Your mileage will vary drastically, though, in this area. 🙂