The concept of coworking spaces as a social space for a bunch of companies to work in is great.<p>From a business standpoint you have a whole variety of different people wit different skills and knowledge who can help you and can bounce ideas off, often for free. They're great for networking and gaining new customers/clients too. You also have this flexible working space, meeting rooms, and multimedia equipment (printers, AV equipment, presentation rooms) that you wouldn't get in a private office as a smaller company. If you're a member of a space that's in a network it makes finding a place to work out of a lot easier when travelling too.<p>That's the theory, at least. And there are a lot of coworking spaces that achieve this, or get close. The one I used to work in was pretty much this. I did have some complaints though about noise, privacy/distraction, and not having a permanent desk to sit every day and pile up my crap.<p>Noise was a bit of an intrinsic problem, it was a high roof warehouse and people had a bad habit of using their phones at their desks (annoying to have a salesperson sitting next to me all day), but I listen to music all day so wasn't too upset.<p>Privacy/distraction was caused by the problem that they didn't have adequate separators/cubical bits at the desks, so you felt like you were sitting at a massive dining table. Nice sometimes, but annoying at others when you're trying to focus.<p>The hotdesking thing was annoying as shit. This was only a problem because my boss was too cheap to pay for permanent desks, which would've also solved the other two problems as we would've been able to customise our space.<p>And that's the core issue of coworking spaces. There's the theory of what a coworking space is: this social collaborative etc. etc. thing. But in reality, far too often they are just a cheap working space, either because companies cannot afford something better, or are just too cheap to pay for something better. Hotdesks are fine if you work in sales and are always out of office or in meetings, or work as a solo founder. But they're horrible if you want to sit in the same place next to your colleagues and code all day.<p>Different work environments work for different people, and in an ideal world everyone would get the work environment they need for optimal productivity. But in reality this doesn't happen because employers are cheap.