Remote isn't for everyone. For me, I love it.
- No commute, saving me seven hours a week.
- No "drive by chatters" showing up at my desk with "Hey do you have a moment?" or just shooting the breeze but dumping me out of the zone.
- I'm not tempted to buy lunch every day, wasting money and time.
- I am more productive; there's nobody playing pingpong, shouting across the open office to each other, cheering at winning in a video game, or delaying me in the hallway on my way to a conference room.
- I don't have to book conference rooms and pressure the previous meeting to vacate on time.
- In a global company, we don't have situations where the one or two remote people are an after-thought to meetings that are being held in person for everyone else. In a meeting, everyone is on the same playing field. There's no office with five people in it, and then one person on a screen.
- Tools have become good enough: Jamboard, Figma, and other collaborative document tools, Meets / Zoom / Teams, tmate / tmux (for terminal-based collaboration; vim, etc.)
- Pair-ups and tutoring can be ad hoc, and when they happen, I'm not needing to book a room or annoy my open office neighbors with chatter.
- My company has people working in every US timezone, plus several timezones in Europe and Asia. If I need to take a 6:30 AM meeting to accommodate folks in India, that used to put me in a position of not having a good option for when to finally commute into the office; go in before? That's rough. Go in after? That might disrupt my day. Now it doesn't matter.
- It's easier to just take a walk, or to pick up a kid from an emergency at school. This de-stresses life a little, making me able to focus better while I'm working.
There are cons, of course:
- In-person, face to face communications includes body language, facial expression, and a bit more freedom to relax and discuss. This hurts more junior developers who need more day to day, hour to hour support.
- It's harder to build team loyalty. You have to plan to spend time together in virtual meetings and possibly occasional in-person meetings.
- Whiteboarding is a little rough still. Figma and Jamboard help, but it's a little harder to brainstorm as a group, and it doesn't just happen as naturally as an in person conversation could migrate to a whiteboard.
- Not everyone has a good place at home to work. I'm lucky that I have a couple of options at home; a nice office that is in a more common area in the home, and then a more "bat cave" office that is quieter and secluded for when the kids are home and noisy.
- Let's be honest; it can be fun going to lunch with your coworkers, exploring the neighborhoods around offices, and so on. We miss that sometimes.
- Some people have trouble unplugging at the end of the day.
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