Now I know that this is a topic that has been debated pretty thoroughly, but I was curious how my own thoughts stood with others in the tech community so this post is tied in with my Mastodon post here.
Background
So to first understand my thinking I thought it might help for you to understand my background a bit when it comes to work in general. I grew up in a blue collar family in the United States, which means often we were working simply for survival. This means that my parents had to get up early in the morning, and go to work at a factory and often would come home later in the evening. I was left to get myself up for school, feed myself, and make sure I was in school on time. This was life and that's how I always understood how life was and that there was no other way. Did we have much of a work/life balance? No, not really, but you don't realize what you don't have if you've never had it. So keep this in mind as I write today about my thoughts on how we work now in the 21st century.
On Site/In Office Working
The majority of my adult life, work has always been "on site" or "in office", and that was fine for me. As stated above, I had always assumed that is how life works, you get up in the morning, you go to work, you do your job, you come home. I had always been fine with that partially because I could build relationships with my co-workers and it felt as a bit of a social life, which when I moved to Germany I had to rebuild. Also at the time it just made sense, that if I had a question or someone needed to ask me something then we would just walk to the other person's desk and speak face-to-face. While face-to-face conversations can be difficult, especially if you don't know the person you are talking to, it can be helpful with the communication because we do not communicate simply with words, but also with our expressions and bodies. This doesn't mean that there weren't drawbacks to working in the office all the time.
First off, when I first moved to Germany, I had to commute pretty far from my home to my office. Since my wife worked at a hospital at the time, and thus had an ever changing schedule, it made sense for us that we live close to where she worked. This meant that I would have to get up very early in the morning, take a tram to the local S-Bahn station and then take a train to the town where my company was located, and then a bus to the company. This was a long commute say over an hour one way a good three hours round trip. This wasn't too bad for the first couple of years as at the time we didn't have children, and with her schedule it could be that when I came home she was either on her way to work, just getting home from work, or was at work and I'd see her in the morning. Yet this still took a lot of time out of my day and wasn't really all that fun. I did get a lot of reading done though. Later after our first child was born we moved to the town where my company was located. This was fine as I could actually walk to work and as my wife was not working full time, and had started working as a freelance midwife, it was good. Here though other problems arised for us, that I would get stuck on a problem and my brain wouldn't let me simply set it aside and go home. Thus my wife would have to call me and ask me what my home coming plans were. Also it was about this time that I was off on multiple international business trips, which of course have to be on site. Finally after the birth of our third child, we moved again, this time to a town a bit further away from the company where I was working and again my commute raised to be about an hour, when everything was going smooth. We did have a car at this time, and I would sometimes drive to the office simply because it was faster, and I felt I could get more work done, I felt I could manage my time better (I didn't I just felt I could). Occasionally I could convince my boss to allow me a home office day, but those were very few and far between. Then I moved to another company with a shorter commute time.
So I started at my current company, and it was still a completely "in office" type job, and as I said I was completely fine with this, because that's just how life worked right? It was while working there I discussed with other developers online via Twitter (remember that site?), and found that there were some that declared their absolute dying love for fully remote work. I will admit I could not wrap my brain around it. How can a team not work together where they could simply share ideas, and spend time together. It was something that I was not ready for personally. I had no desire to work from home on a regualr basis. My boss also wasn't one for home office, and when I would ask if I could do a home office day because my wife was busy and we had a sick kid, it was begrudgingly accepted with a reminder as to the company philosophy that teams work better when they can communicate freely. This is how things stood until 2020.
Fully Remote
So like the rest of the world, in 2020 I experienced full remote work for the first time, and I HATED IT! At first at least. Partially it was from the turmoil of dealing with a pandemic, and partially because I didn't have my own space to work. My work space for the first couple of months was on the couch in the living room. Since our living room also has our dining table, means that if a meeting happened around the time for lunch, the family would have to wait for lunch. It also caused many problems for my work/life balance. I had none as I worked in the same space where I wanted to relax. My brain wasn't programmed for simply shutting off the computer meant time off the clock. So what happened that allowed me to find success during the pandemic?
As I mentioned in my previous post I'm married to an awesome woman, who's brain works so much better than mine when it comes to problem solving. My wife planned, and executed making our basement room into a home office for me. Up to this point, this basement room was our family room and where we would celebrate Holidays and I could use as a painting studio. The problem was that the table and chairs that were currently there weren't really usable for an office. This was easily changed by spending some money on furniture to build me an office along with a comfortable chair, a table that I could raise to make a standing desk, a small carpet to help keep my feet warm, and this became my work from home space until autumn of this year when our eldest child moved out and my office moved to the spare room. This changed things entirely for me, as now I had a separate space, I could turn my brain off when I left my desk. I also found some benefits in my work/life balance that became unlocked. For example, when I'm in the office, my brain really doesn't like it if my lunch is too long, as it wants to catch the train at a specific time so that I'm home at a specific time. When I work from home I do not have this problem. If I want to take an hour for lunch, so that I can take a 30 minute nap after eating, I can do that. Taking a nap at the office is completely impossible for my brain, but certainly I can do it when at home. I do find that at times I tend to work longer when I'm at home, and so I do have to watch that I don't accrue too many hours, but if I need to work longer to solve a problem.
What I did miss though was the comradery of my team. Sure we could video call one another, and we could chat online, or we could send emails, but there was at times a disconnect. This is likely because I enjoy that ability to discuss face-to-face with something, or go to lunch with the team. Team building sometimes requires the ability to be together, and this is harder, or near impossible when working fully remote, at least in my opinion.
Hybrid or Some Days in Office and Others at Home
Since the pandemic has eased enough, my company moved to a hybrid work schedule, where we have 3 days in office and 2 days in home office. That is if we so desire. There are a couple of team members who prefer to work 100% in the office and my boss isn't upset about that. The dev team however prefer to work in hybrid. My fellow lead dev also likes the flexibility to work from home, as she finds she can get nothing but meetings done when we are in the office. I can say I also enjoy the ability to decide to work from home, especially when I have a task like writing a concept for a new feature, because it is quieter at home. Working from home is not all great, even in hybrid. If the kids have something going on, or there's an argument it can be distracting. However, I do get to have lunch with the family which is nice. I can ask the kids how their day has been, and then afterward if my wife has time I can take a short nap, before finishing off my day. Probably one of my biggest hangups when it comes to working from home, is that I will forget to shut off at night. Sometimes my wife will have to come to my work space and remind me what of the time, and ask if what I'm working on really needs done right this minute. Also there are times when I'm working on a blocker for a customer, and I'm stressed trying to get something fixed, and this can also affect my family since when I'm stressed, I can be less patient. Sometimes I have to take a breath before interacting with my kids, when I'm stessed and at home.
How Do My Thoughts Match with Yours?
So it seems I need to generate a few more followers before I try to tie in a Mastodon Poll with my blog, as I only got 2 votes, with one voting for hybrid, and one voting for full remote. So that seems very telling.
Also while working on this post I came across a post on LinkedIn that also gives a direction that I hadn't really thought about as to why full in office work is seen as a negative. You can read the post from Dan Tudorache directly on LinkedIn here. I will paraphrase a bit here. The post describes that perhaps the reason for many companies moving back to in office work is that their leadership is weak, since the leadership does not have trust in their team, and they must see people working to see their value. In anycase it's not really the direction I'm going in this blog, but it is something to think about. As someone who has had leadership positions, even before working in software, I can understand this idea clearly. As a leader, it I have to rely on my team members, and so I have to give trust, provide feedback, and instill confedence. If a team member is having problems, then it is my position to communicate with them, and assist if possible. It could be they are a bad fit, but I can't just assume that when they join the team. It could be that they need help with something, or they need flexibility. These are things that some team members won't just come out and state, as they could be very personal issues. In anycase I as a team lead should ask them what they need. This is part of leadership. I certainly don't think that surveillance is the right direction, constant monitoring too does nothing to instill confidence. I suggest you read the post yourself, and maybe drop a comment. From my own experience the author is pretty active in the comment section on LinkedIn.
Final Thoughts
I think it is important for employers to give their employees as much flexibility as possible. The days of sitting in cubicals and slogging through hours of work wearing suits and dresses are pretty much over. If a company wants to maintain talent, providing their team with the ability to work where ever they are comfortable is a must. So long as the work gets done, and the team can work together, the where it is done shouldn't be a problem.
This has been thoughts from a Jason, until the next post, take care.
Jason