I love working for myself. I wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world. I get to see my kids at school, I get to growl at them to be quiet when they get home, I can choose what I want to work on and when and the satisfaction is amazing when you complete a project by and for yourself. Not to mention no one complains when I have my music up too loud.
But I do miss the social side of having people around. The chats, doing the quiz at lunch, random games of cubicle badminton that leave lovely black marks on freshly painted walls (*cough* never happened *cough*) and having a fellow developer or programmer to discuss problems with was great.
Today an issue with WordPress templates was driving me insane and, according to Google, no on else in the world had ever experienced the problem. Out of the blue my database guru from the States Skyped me about a project we are working on, which then wandered off in to a chat and then on to my WP problem. As he’s in North Carolina it was a bit hard for him to pop his head over the cubicle so we fired up Team Viewer and nutted out a solution. International office chat, I love it.