[devonkim]

I've been working remotely about 5 or so of my 10+ professional years. Working remotely can be a very different experience depending upon job roles. Most of the articles linked on HN are for already-isolating back office jobs like development, but for roles like customer support, sales, an outsourced front desk receptionist, or other highly communication-heavy roles you will not really feel as lonely probably. For coders and asset-producers with pretty clear expected (and more importantly, asynchronous) output, solutions typically focus upon forcing your job duties to include more actual human interaction even if it might not be in-person. However, higher value consultants typically will be communicating a lot more with their clients and spending half your day at Starbucks is going to be few and far between.

Secondly, the "freedom" people tend to talk about is pretty minimal in some roles and being remote tends to reinforce the need for your role to be available as much as possible. If you're the on-call contact in operations where it's arguably more important that you're available immediately rather than that you just make some deadlines (transactional work), you really can't just take off very often like you can oftentimes with very asynchronous, start-stop workflows like development. You're not about to work at Starbucks much unless you can be guaranteed that you won't have a really important call come in. I would have lost precious availability time if I was working at Starbucks a few days ago when I had to manage a production outage and get on the phone and start talking authoritatively quickly. It's one thing to have a kid or pet in the background, it's another when you're obviously sitting at a coffee shop.

For work-life separation, I recommend separate devices from your personal belongings for starters. It's oftentimes substantially cheaper than getting a separate room or larger residence. I have a company-provided laptop that I do my work on as well as a company-provided phone, and that helps keep things separate from the rest of my life. If I have to reach for that phone or RDP / ssh into that machine, that's time I've spent for the company, not for me.