When my company was allowed to work in the office again, I realized that there were two different employees living in me - home and office. They have different performance. In the office, I am concentrated and energetic, I am in constant motion: dash from one part of the open space to another, elevators, corridors, kitchen.
The house also has a kitchen, but nothing else. You sit in a chair all day and look at the computer. The office me rushes from one meeting room to another, and the home version taps on the link in Zuma, stroking the collapsed cat with her free hand.
The thoughts in this article are the result of long conversations with the guys on the We Are Doomed podcast . They helped me to put everything together in one coherent text, for which I thank them. Be sure to watch their episodes - one of the few podcasts where they tell you not only how to work, but also how to live.
Only at a distance did I notice how creepy I have in my apartment. My workplace is a former nursery with yellowish wallpaper and a complete lack of natural light. There is always a light in this room, and there is never a sun. I sit as if in a submarine. I am sure that the lack of movement, light and constant anxiety that you are still at work - all this has a cumulative effect.
Any trip to the cooler in the office is remembered as an adventure
I am used to making a certain amount during working hours. I understand speculatively: my capacity is like this. But at home everything is distracting: children, Xbox, TV, Internet, urgent calls, someone wrote to the cart, my wife sent me to the store. And after a while you realize that, damn it, I usually did more. And you start to compensate for this by processing. For me, this is a kind of a penalty from myself, a punishment for the fact that my home is worse at coping with time management.
Everyone says the first step in dealing with incipient burnout is to stop killing yourself. But I can not. At home, there is always something hinting that I am not in vain scolding myself and punishing myself with overwork. It's easy to create a beautiful illusion for another person, but you can't fool yourself. In fact, you didn’t “think about the problem”, and you didn’t “enter the context” - you were distracted again and did not have time to return to the flow. And you will not be pleased with yourself if this is not backed up by real activity.
Instead of running away from yourself, you need to work on yourself. But it's super hard
And even more so it is difficult to motivate. I make careful attempts, connect HRs, say that the team (and I) need help. Many people look at this as a problem for white people. Like, our business is dying out there, and you are talking about the emotional state, about care. Your problems are somehow not real, too highly intellectual. I do not know, maybe so, but it is definitely necessary to act preventively. Get rid of this fake: "work he home is cool!", Written over a picture of a man working on the beach.
No, this is an illusion.
But I once imagined a remote location as heaven - in the morning I woke up, wrote the code, took a walk, slept, again for the code. In fact, a home is a work without beginning or end. The laptop is open - you work, closed - you don't seem to work. These are clearly not the same time intervals as in the office. There is no such thing that you got up from your workplace and went somewhere. At a distance, you just got up from the table, sat down on the sofa, and what next? Relax?
And so many. I manage people, and I have to know how my guys feel. It's harder to look at the teams. There are performance tracking tools that are, plus or minus, annoying to all developers. There are various agile reports where the word agile is stuck in order to emphasize: no, no, guys, this is not bureaucracy. And in fact, these are the performance metrics of teams.
Usually a lead comes and says, "how can I help you?" Remote home alarm instills paranoia in people that they are actually being told "why are you working so slowly?" The guys had a persistent feeling that now they have begun to zoom in half the time and write less code.
But I'm really trying to help. So far, there are no phenomenal drawdowns in performance, but I can say one thing -
People are suffering more, and this will affect productivity. Just a matter of time
If you rewind a little bit, we will see many companies resisting the transition of employees to telecommuting. Of course, the fight against remote workers is directly tied to the culture of the company. There are old-school offices in which everything is built on the values of the leader. A friend of mine works for such a company, and they have the rules of the 90s. Even at the most severe peak of the pandemic, their leadership opposed remote work: "if you, idlers, are put at home, you will forget your work in 5 minutes."
The notion of developers as the happy-go-lucky ones who are swimming in money and benefits is far from reality. Damn it, this is one of the few professions where a person after the end of the working day continues to think about the task. I got on the subway car and started working. More than once I caught myself thinking: “I'm going home! Why do I still think, where is the bugle there? Most likely here ... Okay, I'll dig more tomorrow. " So half an hour flew by - and that's what it was? Was it the drive home or was it work?
But Wednesday, street, road, passers-by - everyone around is trying to return his head to reality. And you involuntarily switch. At home, work is always near, and it always seems that you pay little attention to it.
Many people think: nothing, soon all the remotes will end, we will return to the office. I'm not sure about this
There is an example of Twitter, which was the first to legalize remote telecommuting, and other Western companies have also made long-term decisions in the spirit: guys who don't want to go to the office, don't go. If we imagine this transitional process as a gradient, then at the right point we will see a full-time remout, in the left - a good old office. There are compromises between them. There will be no abrupt transition for sure. I have a feeling that the IT industry will go to the right. And at the same time, if you have circumstances that do not allow you to work at home, then please - there is a place in the office. We now have up to 20% of employees working in the office.
There are many such guys in my unit. They come to the office for various reasons: someone is undergoing continuous renovation, someone has a one-room apartment and seven are in the shops. There is also just an emotional impulse: "guys, sitting at home is not my thing at all, I want to go to the office." But now, at least at the end of 2020, these are still risks. We just found some middle level where they can be accepted.
Office and home are not just decorations, they are more complicated. It's about how we deal with the idea of being in control of our lives and work. There is a vicious circle “overworking, forgetting to rest, being lazy, blaming ourselves and executing overwork”. The office and the house were tools that helped to tear it apart, to understand where something was. There was order in them, but now everything is mixed.
I believe that mass remoteness will give birth to a new culture, everything will be smoothed out. But it will be long and difficult.