Reflections on 500 Days of Working from Home
I told a coworker that he might be out of the office for an entire summer. He did not believe me…
…and that was last year.
My career, like so many other careers in the world, consists of writing code, reviewing code, and debugging code (I do not want to admit to how much of my time is spent debugging my own code). Some people call it software development, some people call it professional coding, and some people call it software engineering. My official title is the third one, so I go with that.
According to this CNBC article, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic only 7% of United States workers were allowed to telework. At the end of 2021 this number is expected to still be around 40%, and in March of this year the number was 57%. Just two years ago, I thought of working from home as something reserved for only the most skilled engineers. Today it is so normal that I am beginning to forget what life was like before.
This is not going to be an argument for or against working from home — I have my own opinions on the matter, and I am personally caught between the arguments that this allows employees to have more freedom but that the psychological effects of working from home are difficult to overlook. Already I sense that many people will disagree with my second point, so I will simply tell a semi-related anecdote.
A year ago we had an intern. Luckily for him, we were a company that chose to honor internship agreements…probably because we were large enough to shoulder the weight caused by the pandemic. What he probably did not expect is that he would simply stay home, the company would ship him a computer, and everything we worked with him on would simply be relayed over the phone. To say that this was strange would be an understatement, but I have no idea what his opinion was. For all I know, he was thrilled about the money he saved on rent, gas, and feeling obligated to attend after-work events with us.
I like to joke that software engineers were some of the best equipped for the massive shift to (temporarily?) working from home. When you go into the office, you turn on a computer, you communicate with your teammates, and you do your work in front of a screen. When you stay at home you turn on a computer, you communicate with your teammates, and you do your work in front of a screen. I thought I would miss the in-person collaboration, but I had already worked on a distributed team and using features like screen sharing was almost as effective as being in the same room.
That being said, working from home has had its drawbacks.
Working from Home May Be Here to Stay
According to this TechRepublic article, a recent survey sampling software engineers found that “80% of respondents wanted to telecommute the majority of their work schedule even after the pandemic.” “After the pandemic” is, I think, a key phrase here. On one hand, employees may have realized how much flexibility this newfound affords them — they can live alone or with their families, they can often work their own schedules, and they get to avoid a daily commute that is especially burdensome for people who travel a long way to avoid rent costs. Employers, in turn, may have realized that any productivity lost is offset by the amount of money they are saving. Though it is difficult to state without concrete numbers, my current team is probably just as productive as it was before. The reason? We were already distributed across three locations in three states. The main difference is that some of us had worked together in person.
To cite the TechRepublic study again, 17% more software engineers in 2020 said that they felt isolated, and 5% said it was harder to collaborate or feel like part of a team.
Before I transitioned to working from home full-time, my days consisted of a relatively short commute, settling in at the office, occasional in-person meetings, lunches, dinners (hopefully not, though), and sometimes going to the company gym before commuting back. What does my routine consist of now?
Though this is strictly personal, sometimes I barely have one.
The Good
Working from home is a good arrangement, if you do it correctly. I think the fact that so many people want a hybrid schedule, though, indicates that 100% working from home (like I have done for well over a year now) is non-ideal for the majority of people.
This BetterProgramming article is full of insight on how to make the most of a working from home schedule. I wish I could summarize its key points for you and claim that I subscribe to all of them, but that would be hypocritical. For example, one point it makes is on the importance of going out and doing routine exercise. I hate to admit it, but sometimes I have gone for multiple days without even opening the apartment door. I do remember feeling insane on one (just one?) occurrence, when I realized I had not interacted with a human for almost 24 hours in person or online. If I were ever to write about “thriving from home,” it would be a “do what I say, not what I do” kind of thing.
If you look for discussion threads and other Medium posts on working from home, you will find that opinions are rather polarizing. Some argue that this is temporary — I think it is impossible to know without a crystal ball. Some argue that we should try to get back ASAP; these people are typically managers, and employees are quick to write angry Medium comments about how if they want such a great level of control, they are probably bad at their jobs. Again, it is difficult to argue for one extreme or the other. Hybrid may be the way forward, but it is still hard to say.
My company sponsored me for its own “in-house bootcamp” so that I could study for the CompTIA Security+ exam. We had to take it online, which you could say was a bummer, but since we were already going to take it online we found a very convenient course in the East Coast (well, convenient is a debatable term. It started at 6AM, our time). Their hand-drawn diagrams were low-quality because they did not know how to draw on a computer. At one point, a YouTube video froze because screen sharing it brought another layer of complexity. Besides that, the experience was pretty solid.
The exam itself, I think, segues well into the bad…
The Bad
CompTIA exams are actually a compelling look into how the pandemic impacted technology. Before, I am not sure if they even had a “take-at-home” option. During the pandemic, I think I am the only one of my coworkers who took the test at a site…and that is partially because it was timed well with the vaccine.
I took it at an official testing site. There were serious Internet issues. The examiner was forced to call in an IT team. After they fixed it, we took the test about 15 minutes later but still had as much time as we would have otherwise. It was just shifted.
My coworker decided to take it from the convenience of his own home. He had serious Internet issues. They cancelled the test, and it took him a few days to get a refund so that he could take it again. In the end everything was fine, but they did not have a team on standby to send him when things went wrong. My testing site, on the other hand, had a full-time test administrator who was in touch with an IT team, and it was her job to ensure that we had what we needed.
Remote workers spend more on rent and housing than those who stay in the office. Bloomberg cited a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that remote workers tended to increase their rent spending from 6.5% to 7.4%, in the case of apartments, or 8.4% to 9.8% in the case of houses with mortgages and property taxes. The Bloomberg article also adds that this study does not account for “the costs of new equipment, no-longer-free-snacks, desks, and ergonomic gaming chairs.”
The study, of course, is not one-size-fits-all. Did your company have daily catered lunches? Then you are probably spending far more on groceries than you had on food before. Did your company not have daily catered lunches, and did you eat out a lot? Then you may be saving food money. Maybe the company also pays for your equipment. You may get a “psychological high” from this and use it to justify increasing your spending, rendering the savings pointless, but that is more of a behavioral economics kind of tangent.
I like that the Bloomberg article ends on a positive note. Some employers are taking all the money they are saving, and funneling that right back to the employees.
Closing Thoughts
Working-from-home was way better than the alternative, not working at all. I think it is important to emphasize this point, at least before I complain again about the psychological “costs” of working from home indefinitely. Everything shut down. Many companies had the resources to continue. I cannot say for certain how much productivity was lost or gained in the process, but it was like the difference between tapping into a backup generator during a power outage, and sending everyone home.
This is a bad analogy because they sent everyone home, but I am keeping it anyway.
Mental health is difficult to quantify. I have a friend who started college at my Alma Mater, only for a teaching credential instead of as an undergrad. I wrote her a lengthy letter about all the things she would enjoy there. Events. Parties. Stargazing at the arboretum.
After the pandemic hit, I wrote her a revised message. With mock nostalgia, I wrote about things I enjoyed such as playing the piano with someone else before first washing my hands, studying with people without first disinfecting the white board markers, and going to college parties consisting of drinking out of the same red cups and throwing dirty ping pong balls into said cups.
I met someone else in the computer science department, fairly recently, who is about to graduate from the same college and almost never set foot on the actual campus. In the pandemic? Better to attend school than not attend at all. But if given the choice, I am not quite sure how you bridge this gap. What about the whiteboard discussions? What about office hours? What about talking to people at lectures, the hallway talk, the knocking on random dorm rooms to ask someone if they are awake so they can help you debug PSet9 (“wake up, Alex.”)
All of these arguments and ideas may be unsubstantiated now, considering that a software division of a company was able to overcome these kinds of things.
