this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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What are some advantages and challenges you've experienced while working remotely? (self.lifestyle)
submitted 1 year ago by varsock to c/lifestyle
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If you didn't get a choice to work remote, how come?

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[–] attn_dfct_dev 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I enjoyed all the 90% of pros for the first 1.5 years. Then my personality seemed to have changed over, after a bout of Covid. So I now enjoy a hybrid model, with some meticulous commute planning. I live close by, but it still takes me 30 minutes overall. However, I tune out all the traffic and enjoy self-reflection.

Pros and Cons:

  • Picking up my kid is the only one pro I seem to like anymore.
  • I stopped having my regular walks, so I try to go at least 2 days per week.
  • Another short term con — Pushed myself to be more and more independent, making it difficult to survive in Agile software development. In the long term, this is turning out to be a pro, since I am working on my cloud and devops skills. The $company might push me out since I reject these Agile kind of roles, but it might end up helping me.
  • I have become more and more reclusive, isolated and lonely, so I go to the workplace to walk a bit, commune and retain sanity.
[–] pythoneer 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I save about 2.5 hours of commute, remote work is a life saver for me.

[–] JackbyDev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The first real job I had for the first few weeks before I got an apartment I had a 2 hour commute one way so 4 hours total. I didn't even have time to be stressed when I got home.

[–] varsock 1 points 1 year ago

I didn’t even have time to be stressed when I got home.

legendary 😂

[–] varsock 1 points 1 year ago

oh boy! did you drive or take public?

[–] tatterdemalion 3 points 1 year ago

Like others have said, WFH is definitely worth it but I have felt isolated at times and I liked the gym I used to go to close to my old office.

[–] graphicsguy 3 points 1 year ago

I worked remotely for the first 2 years of the pandemic. It was fine at first but when I switched teams and no longer knew everybody from before the pandemic, the social loss started to wear on me. It's not like we had social meetings on my old team, but I think I was able to pretend better or something when I knew everyone in real life.

I also started to struggle to stop working and I hated that and hated the space occupied by my workstation.

I also have a lot of equipment (console dev kits in games industry) and it takes up a lot of precious space.

For all those reasons I'm back in the office 100%. Also I prefer to collaborate in person in my job (it's much easier to hash things out with an artist in person).

Still, there are some things that are permanently changed in ways that make me sad. There will always be some remote folks, so every meeting must be remote accessible (and rightly so), which means we still have to sit on zoom calls a lot of the time. Also zoom has lowered the friction to having a meeting, so we end up having way more meetings.

I don't begrudge the WFHers. I want everyone to have what they want and be happy, and particularly for the parents out there, the saved commute time and flexible hours are a godsend.

[–] balder1993 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For me, not having to deal with traffic and enjoying the quietude of my home is everything. If I had to come back to the office, I’d do my best to start my own company on the side and create a remote team around a product.

[–] varsock 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

has bringing your work and any potential stressors home affected the "quietude of your home?" I ask because I have come to detest that corner in my home where I work - especially after a particularly stressful day. And I'm afraid it accumulates to where I don't feel "free" in that same room.

[–] firelizzard 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For people who struggle with WFH, a common recommendation is to create a space in your home for work, ideally a room. It sounds like you already have a space but if there's a spare room being able to close the door on that space may help you.

Beyond that... would you rather detest the office or detest that one part of your house? Maybe you would prefer it to be the office, but changing where you work likely won't change whether you have that reaction.

Personally, I have one PC and I don't have a separate space, but I wasn't any good at work-life separation when I was working in an office. I'd still come home and spend the entire night thinking about work, or actually doing work on the occasions I brought home my work laptop. I'm not exactly a workaholic (I'd prefer to not be thinking about work all the time) but I can't turn it off, even if my code and my computer are somewhere else.

[–] varsock 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

whether I am on a roll or at a roadblock, I too can relate that I think about my code non-stop. Throughout the day, I have ups and down of "engagement". Therefore I try to time when I am in a lull and separate from work then. Sometimes it is earlier than a work day, sometimes its later. When I am still particularly active about thinking, I like to go for a jog at marathon pace or a bike ride. Something that preoccupies me physically while my mind runs around. Don't know how, perhaps by association, but when my body gets tired from running, so does my mind.

As for:

changing where you work likely won’t change whether you have that reaction. This is very wise. I did not look at it this way. I will try to approach the problem with this mindset.

[–] lasagna 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pros: no commute, standup desk, background tv, cooking, can do tasks like making appointments, can attend personal appointments, works great with my flexible hours.

Cons: harder to focus, I like my coworkers so I prefer to be in the office to interact, feels rather isolated.

During long weeks I like to take one full wfh day. It almost feels like a nice break.

[–] varsock 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

do you feel isolated in being left out of informal interactions, like "shooting the shit", or because your coworkers aren't as accessible to collaborate using whatever company chat system?

[–] firelizzard 2 points 1 year ago

When I was working remotely and the rest of the team was in the office, I did feel left out. An organization that's part WFH and part office-based has to be very careful to avoid that. My current job is 100% WFH so there's nothing to be left out of, but I do still feel isolated. I don't miss the commute, and I don't miss the office, but I do really miss being around people.

[–] lasagna 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd say it's a more general form of isolation.

[–] varsock 2 points 1 year ago

Like @ethan said

I don’t miss the commute, and I don’t miss the office, but I do really miss being around people.

We are a social species and I guess we have to respect that. I have trouble finding those folks with similar interests. And if i find them, I might still drop the ball in engaging.

[–] JackbyDev 3 points 1 year ago

I can't know the future but I will most likely refuse to work in an office ever again (even hybrid). There are some cons to fully remote but I really can't justify them. I have so much more time. I can roll out of bed, get breakfast, and log on. That's instead of rolling out of bed, getting breakfast, taking a shower, getting dressed, driving (and maybe also taking a train which is a nice moment of free time), parking, and then logging on.

[–] varsock 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've clawed back 1.5 hours a day and save roughly $100 a week on commuting costs. As for challenges, I've had much more friction when needing to access work resources remotely. A pet peeve of mine is the lag when needing to access VMs on prem. I know, I know, a first world problem. But if you had to debug and sift through logs as much as I have to, you'd rage too. :)

I am also mildly stressed because this is not a permanent arrangement and it can change at a moments notice.

[–] firelizzard 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This might not be feasible for you, but Visual Studio Code supports remote development. It more or less runs the GUI on your local PC and runs all the language services, debuggers, etc on the remote machine. That doesn't eliminate lag, but it certainly can improve it.

[–] varsock 2 points 1 year ago

thanks for the tip! Yes i use the remote development features of my IDE or work out of a terminal - when I learned about this it changed my world. Input lag still blows but is much better. I, unfortunately, sometimes have to look at dashboards and navigate them. In those instances I port forward so the UI elements are loaded locally by my machine, and the only lag is server response time. But keeping track of all ports i've forwarded, plus makng sure the tunnels don't die - these things are like pebbles in your shoe.

[–] Blackthorn 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Working remotely for me means:

  1. no commute (saves money AND time)
  2. having lunch with my wife in a day that's not a weekend
  3. not having to stress out to leave the office in a hurry to pickup my daughter from school
  4. better work-life balance. Can even nap 20-30 min at lunch time, buy groceries outside rush hours, etc.
  5. more productivity due to fewer distractions. No need of noise cancelling headphones to survive the open space noise in the office.
  6. meetings with colleagues over zoom are more painful, but this keeps them brief, so another plus in the end :)
  7. more time to spend with friends (I don't have to pretend that colleagues and friends are the same thing anymore).

My company is now in a hybrid model and I dislike each of the three days I'm forced to be in the office.