Never have I ever- A narrative on one year of work from home

My personal and professional personas are violently different. I have a hundred excuses to not visit a friend or to answer a phone for casual chat. On the other hand, I absolutely thrive on in-person office interactions, especially given the nature of my job. I need to be in the same room as the client, to see what they see, to feel what they feel and to understand what they are trying to get developed to alleviate their pain points.

Needless to say, I am conflicted. I want the comfort of my room and recluse for my own me-time. To write, to dream, to just be. However, when working, it has made my job increasingly difficult. I have to put in extra hours and efforts in the discovery workshops and negotiations, I have to do way more follow-ups with the stakeholders and the team to make sure we are all on the same page. Some things still escape the tight control I have on my plans.

But that is just me. Someone, who is doomed to be a spokesperson for all parties without most days actually seeing any of them. I suspect the feelings are divergent for people who code and test. They might actually like not having someone talk into their ear all the time. They probably get more work done. However, I think that is contingent on how clearly they know WHAT to do.

So many things have been rendered obsolete in the new normal. Simple things like coffee- breaks and water cooler meetups, casual brainstorming sessions in the cafeteria and a general turn around time on receiving help on a task. There is a wave of forgetfulness too, as I have observed, because most of us have divided attentions and priorities.

Pros and cons, I suppose.

In working on my fourth project, for the first time, I advocated for a video meeting, not just with the team but the stakeholder too. For some time, it had been feeling like the stakeholder and I were using people as any automated machine, only contacting them when we needed an update or to relay information. There would be no sympathy when someone was sick, or a jubilant celebration on delivering a successful demo. Normally, by now I would have taken the team out for lunch/ dinner at least twice. C’est la vie.

I wanted to know who the youngest member was in our team, so we could tease and welcome him. I wanted to know what they did in their previous organizations. I wanted to share experiences, but most of all I wanted the client to see our faces, to see the humans behind the lines of code we share with them. Because God knows how long it will be before we have client visits and corporate dinners back on schedule.

If you have not had a video call with the stakeholders, I strongly suggest it. I noticed an immediate shift in tone and increase in congeniality. These were people, bundled up in sweaters and jackets, fighting the cold, the attention grabs from their little ones, but still trying their very best to do what they were hired to do. The developers sported various lengths of beards perhaps according to the complexity of their tasks; the bespectacled QA team was a little too happy with their zero defect rejection ratio; the technical architect looking all the bit like a brave defender of the castle of our project; the customer, looked- surprised.

10/10 would do it again.