Ask HN: Living in a hacker house – Is it worth it?

www.hackerhousefuntimes.com <---- This is the current status of the establishment

I think that you can get a lot of the benefits by being smart about organising your work and social life.

You don't need to sleep in the same place as other cool people to work/hang out with them.

Crappy living conditions seriously diminishes quality of life and productivity (and those photos seem to indicate a pretty crappy place)

I used to live in a similar communal-type living space. There were a lot of interesting people, great way to network and all that but things werent really run that well management-wise. Eventually the substandard conditions became common knowledge, not many people wanted to live there anymore and it ended up shutting down (bit of a pity tbh).

The irony is that the people who are happy to put up with those kind of conditions, are often the kind of people who don't want to pay their rent.

Depends, how many of these 'hackers' are actually software engineers and how many of them are "UX-Experts" (idea people) or "Project Manager MBAs"?

It's hard to judge your situation from across the internet, but I'll point out two things I've learned over the years:

1. Personal responsibility varies from person to person, related to such as personality and maturity. I enjoy maintaining a functional and orderly living environment, where some people don't particularly mind slightly more disorder if it means less work.

That's ok, in itself. But problems like yours arise where people are mismatched on responsibility. Living alone guarantees that this never happens, but is not the only way. If you can find peers who share your sense of responsibility, then living with many others can still work out.

With that said, I know my priorities bias me to optimize for responsible people first, so I opt to live with the small number of people I can find.

2. I've found Hacker Houses intellectually frustrating environments in surprising ways. I realized over time that I enjoy living with people doing vastly different things, well outside of technology or science. Living with people who are thinking about the same things leads me to tunnel vision and eventual irritation/cynicism. Maybe that's just me.

I lived there this summer for a couple weeks, and I really enjoyed it, although I don't think I ever heard anyone refer to it as a "hacker house" (perhaps they rebranded?).

When I was there, it seemed like the manager lived there and was taking care of everything, although some parts of the space had not yet been completed. I'm surprised to see it in this condition.