I started my professional career in IT/software industry 15
years back and working to me always meant going to an office with cubicles, the
typical IT company set-up. Nothing much changed over the years though we moved
from using ‘desktops’ to using laptops, the overall concept of office was same
for me. There was a team I would work with locally and there would be folks
from another location in India or abroad you would work/collaborate with. Once
I moved to US in early 2013, I found out that my team was mostly in two cities in US and with some folks spread all over the country .
Most folks in my location had never met our manager in person. The project I
was on had folks from several cities ( several time zones) spread across this
super large country. This was one of the world’s largest communications
company, so they had this view that location is not an issue as we have enough
tools to keep you all connected and it did make sense. But the concept of
office which for me was being with team mates you sit with and work together,
attend meetings together or hang out together for lunch/ water cooler / coffee
break conversations, that changed totally. Sure half of my project team was
still in same location but the folks I spent most of the time with were just
voices on phone. A person I was working closely initially told me that she was
a ‘remote office worker’ for almost 10 years now and that was something really
hard for me to imagine from where I came from at that point. She set up some
time to catch up me in general to ask about me, my family and to talk in general
to find common points of interest to chat about and she said that she makes an
effort to do this as it helps to build better bonds with co-workers.
In early 2016, I switched over from being a contractor to a
full time employee with my current employer and also moved teams. So while I
did work from home 1 day a week in the previous 3 years, this was different.
Now I had the option to actually work from home almost full time. I resisted
that and opted to do a combination of working from office as well as from home.
At office I did not have a designated desk however, there was something called ‘Drop-in
seats’. So everyday you go in and find an empty desk and sit and use it for the
day. I tried going to this kind of office set-up for two days a week initially,
very soon I had certain days where I did not know anyone who sat near me in office
or met anyone who I knew the whole day. So it sort stopped making sense and I
decided to work fully from home.
It was something that was much needed at that point in life with a new born daughter and wife opting to take a break for an year to spend time with baby. Having spent a good part of previous 3-4 months making just weekly one or two visits to office and not having any meaningful interaction with anyone at office just made it easy to transition into full time working from home office. From productivity perspective I felt it made no difference whether I was working from home or office. While you could potentially get distracted and step away for personal stuff more when you work out of home, office also has its fair share of distractions like chatting with folks during coffee or spending a good amount of time during lunch. While working from lunch mostly was something I would eat quickly and get back to desk in 10-15 mins and coffee was consumed in my office room.
Office room, that was something that I slowly added. When I first moved to US, I had rented a single bedroom apartment but then every friday I started working from home. Sitting and working from bed started causing back pain, so a table and chair was added. After that we moved houses a few times and every time I insisted on having 2 or 3 Bed apartment so that I can use one room as my office. More on the office room later, but for now I had some space to sit and things were set for fully working from home.
One of the big challenges of being remote is getting cut from cooler talk at office and corridor conversations both of which help in taking you forward and I found that there was no easy solution to that. It was extremely hard to form bonds with people you never met, how much ever you tried to build good rapport over phone calls or messenger it still did not have the warmth of real conversations at least for me. Luckily I happened to work for a couple of years in our offices in both Seattle and Dallas the two places with lot of folks I would interact with and having met them at some point in person and having had regular conversations with them in past did help when we started interacting virtually. Of course there were lot of folks I never met but did work with easily.
A typical work day would be involve waking up early ( mostly by 6- 6:30 AM) preparing something for lunch that day and getting ready - taking bath, ironing shirt / trousers and getting your socks and shoes ready and rushing out by 8:30 AM. All of that no longer needed to be done in an intense 2 hour window in the morning. There was no need really for any fancy office wear or ironing formal shirts and trousers! I could start my day much more calmly by slowly consuming morning coffee, spending time going through news on phone. Taking time to eat proper breakfast and not wolf down mouthfuls of plain old breakfast cereal or bread. For the record I did take bath daily, even if I was spending time at home throughout. I did avoid shaving for several days altogether and did have an occasional stubble but only change was I did not need to shower early in the morning. I could actually do it a little later in the day if I wanted. Having that choice was great.
A huge change and a positive with this lifestyle was not having to do any sort of commute in the morning to work. After my coffee and based on the workload and things going on at that point, I will login to work by 7 to 7:30 AM and spend some 30 min working on emails that had come in either early that morning or late in the evening. After that I would spend some more time at home doing anything that needed to be done or doing nothing at all and around 9 AM start my day at work in my office room. Sometimes this meant I will go for an early morning walk/run. During non-summer months going for a walk/run before 7 was hard but with this arrangement I could go for 30 min walk at 8 or 9 AM. Which ever way you see for my employer this meant an earlier start than the usual 9:30 start if I was working out of an office building and I would have handled essential tasks and had a better view of what was needed by the time I started. Not being at work meant lesser distractions ... really that is a true statement. You would think it is easier to slack off at home than at work but I think if you want to slack off you can do that anywhere. When you need to focus on something, being at home where you are usually undisturbed works better than an office cubicle or the open work-space that we used to have where you will spot someone who will come over for a chat or you walk around for getting water/coffee or bathroom break and bump into someone and end up chatting. Most of those did not happen when working at home. You do chat with folks online and have occasional casual conversations but the frequency was lot lesser. That perhaps helped from productivity perspective but overall I did miss the human touch or interacting with fellow human beings.
Lunch was another bright prospect during 2016 and most of 2017 my wife was either on maternity leave or had taken break to spend time with our daughter. So she was around plus we had both sets of parents visiting and someone was there for at least 9 months an year. So eating super hot lunch which gets prepared fresh was a great experience, something I think you cannot put monetary value against. You finish up work and instead of reheating in microwave your lunch prepared either the previous day or assembled in hurry that morning , here was fresh cooked food served piping hot.
During late afternoons again fresh home brewed coffee or tea with some snacks, it was good indeed. Overall I was extremely careful and conscious that being a remote worker any unexplained absence will not be viewed well, so I had to ensure no one thinks I'm misusing this and that attitude perhaps made it work. Of course I did take those occasional trips to shop for stuff during the day when the workload was light and there was nothing pressing or urgent requiring my presence in front of the computer. Its actually pretty nice to shop during the day as the lines at counter are better and folks are not in super rush both on the roads and in the shops. You see a totally different crowd than the ones you see when you shop in evenings. Right from the time I started working, the jobs I did were always the ones you were confined inside a large glass building and stayed there from morning till dusk. Until this point in life I had never seen how it is outside during a regular working weekday, it was good to experience that. At least initially there was a feeling of pulling off something sneaky when you went shopping at 11 Am or 3 PM. I once went for a haircut at 10 Am and the lady asked if I have taken the day off and I said no, I create my own schedules with great pride. Those were certainly some high points, needless to add being around when you have a little one helped in managing things. When we started sending daughter to daycare, since I was at home it was easy to go and pick her up early. Once my wife started working and she had an hour plus commute to get to her workplace then I could easily take care of home needs when she was out. I would feed our daughter and drop her to daycare and take care of dishes in sink and laundry whenever I found some gaps during my workday schedule.
Being at home ensured it was not overwhelming and I could be around if needed for anything. Having said that I sometimes started missing office, despite the rosy picture I painted. Maybe it has something to do with us being social animals, you do need to meet folks have casual conversation. That applies to even some one like me who was/is never into socializing a lot. Another realization was that we don't have any friends anymore where lived. There were folks I used to work with a while ago before I switched jobs, but I had lost contact with them. My wife had moved between 3 short term projects in an year in Texas before taking maternity break so we basically had zero friends from work. Being relatively new in this city and being part of a culture where interacting with neighbors is rare, it was tough finding social company. We hardly had anyone, most friends of mine were in different cities and we just interacted on whatsapp regularly or over phone once in a month. So that was an aspect which I found pretty challenging, sometimes I would find some excuse to go to some grocery store just to step out of home. It was until well into mid of this year that we made some new friends in our apartment community and started going for potlucks and birthday parties. All of which was thanks to our little daughter ( but more on that later!)
So when they finally changed the way we work and asked us to come to office and work from there regularly by March of this year I did not mind at all. Initially it was hard to sit in one place the whole day especially if you are not having a busy day but slowly got adjusted. There are several aspects of the remote life I missed like not having to drive to office during rush hour, eating good fresh hot home food and having a lot of control over your time and being productive and also having time to do a lot of things you want. As much as I loved all of these things, sometimes you have to admit that having 4 people in same room and talking in person easily beats having couple of long conf-calls. Lot of times 'face-time' makes a difference and you do get undivided attention which never happens with people on conference calls. So while it does seem plausible to me to have a future where people work seamless and collaborate across the globe and offices moving away from conventional office after having been there and being back again I guess there is no easy answer.
Ultimate long term fantasy for me is to become a remote worker from some hill station in India, perhaps even doing my current role as product manager in a US company. Lot of companies have tried to embrace remote workers route and changed back to offices as its not really easy to make it work but I think eventually we will find a way to make it work. My current take is that such lifestyle should be possible if we are willing to find some common time window of 4 hours for entire team to connect and maybe meet in person once in every 6 months and spend a week together. I think over a period of time as we get more and more global ( though an equally competitive surge of nationalism will challenge it), physical boundaries will fade away or will not be a deterministic factor in certain occupations/industries or roles. Tons of studies and lot of chatter about how high paying tech jobs have altered certain cities offer a cautionary tale. Cities mostly never keep up with huge number of high laying jobs suddenly pouring in and locals who don't work in such places invariably hate these companies. From such considerations having workforce spread over the country makes lot of sense and I'm certain lot of remote jobs will be part of the future.
A typical work day would be involve waking up early ( mostly by 6- 6:30 AM) preparing something for lunch that day and getting ready - taking bath, ironing shirt / trousers and getting your socks and shoes ready and rushing out by 8:30 AM. All of that no longer needed to be done in an intense 2 hour window in the morning. There was no need really for any fancy office wear or ironing formal shirts and trousers! I could start my day much more calmly by slowly consuming morning coffee, spending time going through news on phone. Taking time to eat proper breakfast and not wolf down mouthfuls of plain old breakfast cereal or bread. For the record I did take bath daily, even if I was spending time at home throughout. I did avoid shaving for several days altogether and did have an occasional stubble but only change was I did not need to shower early in the morning. I could actually do it a little later in the day if I wanted. Having that choice was great.
A huge change and a positive with this lifestyle was not having to do any sort of commute in the morning to work. After my coffee and based on the workload and things going on at that point, I will login to work by 7 to 7:30 AM and spend some 30 min working on emails that had come in either early that morning or late in the evening. After that I would spend some more time at home doing anything that needed to be done or doing nothing at all and around 9 AM start my day at work in my office room. Sometimes this meant I will go for an early morning walk/run. During non-summer months going for a walk/run before 7 was hard but with this arrangement I could go for 30 min walk at 8 or 9 AM. Which ever way you see for my employer this meant an earlier start than the usual 9:30 start if I was working out of an office building and I would have handled essential tasks and had a better view of what was needed by the time I started. Not being at work meant lesser distractions ... really that is a true statement. You would think it is easier to slack off at home than at work but I think if you want to slack off you can do that anywhere. When you need to focus on something, being at home where you are usually undisturbed works better than an office cubicle or the open work-space that we used to have where you will spot someone who will come over for a chat or you walk around for getting water/coffee or bathroom break and bump into someone and end up chatting. Most of those did not happen when working at home. You do chat with folks online and have occasional casual conversations but the frequency was lot lesser. That perhaps helped from productivity perspective but overall I did miss the human touch or interacting with fellow human beings.
Lunch was another bright prospect during 2016 and most of 2017 my wife was either on maternity leave or had taken break to spend time with our daughter. So she was around plus we had both sets of parents visiting and someone was there for at least 9 months an year. So eating super hot lunch which gets prepared fresh was a great experience, something I think you cannot put monetary value against. You finish up work and instead of reheating in microwave your lunch prepared either the previous day or assembled in hurry that morning , here was fresh cooked food served piping hot.
During late afternoons again fresh home brewed coffee or tea with some snacks, it was good indeed. Overall I was extremely careful and conscious that being a remote worker any unexplained absence will not be viewed well, so I had to ensure no one thinks I'm misusing this and that attitude perhaps made it work. Of course I did take those occasional trips to shop for stuff during the day when the workload was light and there was nothing pressing or urgent requiring my presence in front of the computer. Its actually pretty nice to shop during the day as the lines at counter are better and folks are not in super rush both on the roads and in the shops. You see a totally different crowd than the ones you see when you shop in evenings. Right from the time I started working, the jobs I did were always the ones you were confined inside a large glass building and stayed there from morning till dusk. Until this point in life I had never seen how it is outside during a regular working weekday, it was good to experience that. At least initially there was a feeling of pulling off something sneaky when you went shopping at 11 Am or 3 PM. I once went for a haircut at 10 Am and the lady asked if I have taken the day off and I said no, I create my own schedules with great pride. Those were certainly some high points, needless to add being around when you have a little one helped in managing things. When we started sending daughter to daycare, since I was at home it was easy to go and pick her up early. Once my wife started working and she had an hour plus commute to get to her workplace then I could easily take care of home needs when she was out. I would feed our daughter and drop her to daycare and take care of dishes in sink and laundry whenever I found some gaps during my workday schedule.
Being at home ensured it was not overwhelming and I could be around if needed for anything. Having said that I sometimes started missing office, despite the rosy picture I painted. Maybe it has something to do with us being social animals, you do need to meet folks have casual conversation. That applies to even some one like me who was/is never into socializing a lot. Another realization was that we don't have any friends anymore where lived. There were folks I used to work with a while ago before I switched jobs, but I had lost contact with them. My wife had moved between 3 short term projects in an year in Texas before taking maternity break so we basically had zero friends from work. Being relatively new in this city and being part of a culture where interacting with neighbors is rare, it was tough finding social company. We hardly had anyone, most friends of mine were in different cities and we just interacted on whatsapp regularly or over phone once in a month. So that was an aspect which I found pretty challenging, sometimes I would find some excuse to go to some grocery store just to step out of home. It was until well into mid of this year that we made some new friends in our apartment community and started going for potlucks and birthday parties. All of which was thanks to our little daughter ( but more on that later!)
So when they finally changed the way we work and asked us to come to office and work from there regularly by March of this year I did not mind at all. Initially it was hard to sit in one place the whole day especially if you are not having a busy day but slowly got adjusted. There are several aspects of the remote life I missed like not having to drive to office during rush hour, eating good fresh hot home food and having a lot of control over your time and being productive and also having time to do a lot of things you want. As much as I loved all of these things, sometimes you have to admit that having 4 people in same room and talking in person easily beats having couple of long conf-calls. Lot of times 'face-time' makes a difference and you do get undivided attention which never happens with people on conference calls. So while it does seem plausible to me to have a future where people work seamless and collaborate across the globe and offices moving away from conventional office after having been there and being back again I guess there is no easy answer.
Ultimate long term fantasy for me is to become a remote worker from some hill station in India, perhaps even doing my current role as product manager in a US company. Lot of companies have tried to embrace remote workers route and changed back to offices as its not really easy to make it work but I think eventually we will find a way to make it work. My current take is that such lifestyle should be possible if we are willing to find some common time window of 4 hours for entire team to connect and maybe meet in person once in every 6 months and spend a week together. I think over a period of time as we get more and more global ( though an equally competitive surge of nationalism will challenge it), physical boundaries will fade away or will not be a deterministic factor in certain occupations/industries or roles. Tons of studies and lot of chatter about how high paying tech jobs have altered certain cities offer a cautionary tale. Cities mostly never keep up with huge number of high laying jobs suddenly pouring in and locals who don't work in such places invariably hate these companies. From such considerations having workforce spread over the country makes lot of sense and I'm certain lot of remote jobs will be part of the future.
