Lifestyle and Leisure

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.