Since the start of the pandemic Iāve been working remotely from my the leisure of my home. Itās been +2 years (wow, time flies!) now and during this time Iāve learned a lot. Here are my 4 lessons learned working remotely.
To clarify, I work in a distributed team and weāre all working remotely. My experience and lessons learned are based on this type of team setup.
Social Isolation (AKA āI Miss My Colleaguesā)
This point is probably the most obvious one. I miss hanging out with my colleagues, whether it be getting a coffee, talking about the weekend or just having people around me while I work. One thing in particular I miss is being able to roll over to someoneās desk and say āHey, can you help me with this?ā. In a remote world I have to schedule a meeting, maybe share my screen and make sure we donāt talk over each other in Zoom sigh!
Lesson learned: Interacting with other social beings is more important for my well-being than I thought
Social Activities Online Suck
I work in a team and we used to get together every Friday in the office for some good olā fun by playing Exploding Kittens, maybe having some snacks and beer, or just bonding over non-work related topics.
Today is different. We have a slot every Friday afternoon dedicated to having fun but itās just not the same. Sometimes people have too much screen fatigue and just wants some time away from the computer, which makes a lot of sense, and they skip the meeting. Or sometimes youāre in the middle of something on Slack and itās hard to focus on the having fun part.
We do have fun in the meeting but itās not comparable with having a laugh face-to-face.
Lesson learned: Digital social activities cannot replace in real life social activities
Improved Work-Life Balance, if You Let It
At the start of the pandemic I quickly realised that if I was gonna make it I needed to start taking better care of my self. After not leaving my apartment for a few days and feeling terrible, I set out a goal for my self to take a brisk walk before work every morning. This evolved into a passion for exercise and now I take runs or go to the gym before work, and the difference is like night and day! I take the time I was spending on commuting and use it for something healthy instead.
A downside to working from home is that at the end of the work day itās easy to just keep working. I sometimes forget about time and then all the sudden itās dinner time and Iām still writing code. āJust one more testā I tell my self. This is a drawback and what works for me is sticking to my schedule I had at the office.
Lesson learned: Spend the time you save from commuting wisely, and stick to the schedule you had when working at the office
Remote Pair Programming Is Hard
Because I work as a software engineer, writing code is part of my day-to-day job. Sometimes in my team we do what we is called pair programming, thatās when we write code as a together as a pair. One person writes the code and the other one watches, makes comments and asks questions. There are many different ways to do this and I wonāt cover them all here.
Pair programming over the internet is hard! We struggle a lot with this in my team. There are tools that help us, such as Tuple, but even with the best of tools available itās hard. I easily lose focus when I get some irrelevant notification, or want to check something on my computer.
I miss having pen and paper to quickly sketch out my thinking to my colleague, or a whiteboard where we can have lively discussions and other people can join in. From experience, this is how the best solutions are discovered.
Lessons learned: Even with the best remote pair programming tools available, nothing beats in real life pair programming
Lessons Learned To summarise, here are the 4 lessons Iāve learned working remotely for +2 years.
- Interacting with other social beings is more important for my well-being than I thought
- Digital social activities cannot replace in real life social activities
- Spend the time you save from commuting wisely, and stick to the schedule you had when working at the office
- Even with the best remote pair programming tools available, nothing beats in real life pair programming
Conclusion
Weāre living in an interesting time period. Remote work has been around for many years but itās just recently most software companies are forced to adapt to this new environment. Personally, I think remote work is here to stay, whether you like it or not, and companies that do not offer remote work will lose talent.
Computer science has been around since the 1960s and weāre still trying to figure out the best software development methodologies, programming language features and ways of communicating. The remote work era has just begun and I canāt wait to see what innovations comes next that will help us move into this new way of working.
Iāll most likely be working remotely in the upcoming years, and I look forward to seeing what additional lessons I have learned reading this post in a few years from now!
Connect with me on Twitter @prplcode
Originally published at prplcode.dev