working from home and does seem like it will change anytime soon
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As I said before, I work from home and have for years. The company I work for had all staff working from home through the lockdown. Monday, they opened the office and got everyone back, yesterday one office worker tested positive for covid and today everyone has been chased back home again. 90% of them very happy to do so.
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I am currently an IT field technician, however, unless actual work comes in, client PCs, on site requests, I am allowed to stay at home providing remote support, which has become very easy to do, since a lot of people have begun to get teamviewer and anydesk. I am also now able to do remote support on phones, since anydesk has an app there as well.
My dad who works as an IT consultant, also told us, his boss is perfectly fine with them working from home, but the boss would just like to see them every once in a while at least. So from next year there will be some plans made for my dad to at least be in the office once a month for a week or so, just to show his face basically.
I almost feel like some bosses just donāt want people to work from home, because they themselves are unable/donāt want to work from home (if I canāt work from home, nobody will 
)
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Well, yes and no. We started going back to my clientās office a couple of weeks ago and I find myself there for around 3-4 hours at least 3 times a week. Last week I had a flight up to our Centurion office which was pretty much a whole-day event.
Having experienced work-from-home on a personal level and seeing how it impacted the various teams of developers we have (we have 46 developers in the company), I have to admit that face time with people has immense value. Especially where the teams are larger (typically more than 4 people).
We had so many issues where emotions were misread, discussions were misunderstood and requirements or implementation solutions were incorrectly implemented over the past couple of months - all due to remote meetings. Since being back at the office and being able to sit together and work through problems together with the team, Iāve noticed almost an immediate jump in quality and reduction in time to complete sprint tickets.
All that being said, I still value the alone time to be able to focus on urgent work. So I spend mornings from around 04:30 - 07:00 to get work done that I need to focus on, with my first daily meeting kicking off at 07:00 (remotely). I usually get ready for the office around 08:00 and arrive there at 08:30 at the latest. I then spend time there until 11:00-12:00, after which I go home to finish off some remote work and engage in remote meetings with the Centurion office. I then finish off each day with a final 15:00-16:30 (remote) conference meeting.
So in reality I spend about a third of my 12-hour workday at the office(s).
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Weāve been working from home almost exclusively, since the inception of lockdown back in March 2020.
It has really worked wonders, part of our company culture is responsibility and accountability, therefore it serves well on the individuals and we do our part. Our financial year has actually seen an increase over previous, granted only something like a 14%, but itās still worth noting given the circumstances.
That being said, our leadership team has already stated that we should not expect to return to the office until 2021, nor a ānormalā working model ever again. They expect and anticipate that, and I paraphrase, āwe do not expect everyone to all be at the office at the same time ever againā. This losly translates to a working or office environment of floating desks, and couches and only going in maybe a day or two of a week.
On that note, Iām a firm believer in giving kudos where it is due, and I canāt be thankful enough to the decisions that our management has taken. If it werenāt for working from home I may not have experienced my sons first steps, first teeth, first wordsānot to mention the casualness and freeedom I can take when I want to take a walk with my family at lunch.
They have also equiped those who are not capable of working from home, with the ability of doing so, by providing 3G dongles, monthly data allowances, chairs, desks, etc. I canāt express my gratitude enough for being allowed such liberties.
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I work mostly from home now. Go into work 1 or 2 days a week. Go into work to discuss things or sort stuff out there and then go home and code. It works well.
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Yeah we work in IT so I suppose itās easier for us. We work alot with Azure and M365 so in a way of showing our customers how you can run things from there we did exactly that. Moved our DCs and servers to Azure, switch the Azure AD Auth and now we donāt even need half of the infrastructure we used to have.
We also have something like this so everyone takes responsiblity for what they do, no lounging around. Plus we bill our clients for time so thatās one way of making sure the bosses knowing we arenāt just faffing around whole day.
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Iāve back at the office since 1st of May. Overall, I didnāt enjoy working from home. The big bosses figured it meant we were all on call 24/7, but also felt that noone worked at all during the 5 weeks and we were all taking a holiday.
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I will admit, sometimes this is exactly what it feels like.
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Take it up with whoever you need to. Youāre an employee, that is paid to work for a set time a day. I mean, basic labour law covers this kind of nonsense. Sure, someone might want to know youāre doing work when youāre supposed to. But it cuts both ways, no company gets to own you outside of work time.
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Absolutely. Luckily they stopped that nonsense as soon as we were back at the office.
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Yeah, just cos iām working from home doesnāt mean Iām now available to your beck and call.
I donāt work set hours anymore, I work when I feel like working. My days get planned around my meeting times now and it works out great for me. I get massive amounts of quality time with the mrs and the kids and to help out around the house.
But I can completely understand why some people prefer to work from an office environment, it really is a preference thing once you have found a good rhythm. I guess the biggest challenge for me is finding dedicated focus time.
Then again there are plenty methods and tools to help with these kind of things, use a pomodoro technique to help and time box your work sessions. Set some structure and routines.
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Iāve been working from home since 2002 so for me it has been business as usual. Our whole company is set up that everyone works from home (theirs, not mine), although the other people used to spend a lot of time onsite at clients. That has now changed to mostly virtual meetings. My partner is very happy about that because he used to waste hours of time on the road and in the air going from meeting to meeting. We do have a virtual office though that serves as the company address and we use their boardrooms whenever weāre all in one place if we want to have face-to-face meetings.
The different personality types do play a big role though. One of our ex-employees had a really hard time working in isolation which caused his productivity to be almost non-existent. So working from home isnāt for everybody.
In my case, between my insomnia and the twins, it works out perfectly. My wife can sleep peacefully at night while I get work done (uninterrupted) and then I sleep during the day with the aircon on full blast.
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I guess the insomnia kicked in right about now?
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Nah, only when I go and try and sleep. I slept from sometime after 7am until around 12ā¦ but I only fell asleep sometime after 7am after trying to sleep since 5:30. My problems are that Iām either struggling to fall asleep (like this, or rather yesterday, morning) and then to stay asleep for at least 6 hours (like yesterday afternoon).
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Big, if peer reviewing and safety data hold up:
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The phases typically employed have the safety testing along with efficacy in phase 3. This means that, hopefully, any safety issues would have reared its head along with the efficacy data, so Iād take this as very promising. Itād be great if the vaccine can reach proper production by mid-2021!
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/test-approve.html
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Yeah, people often start to think that since these things are testing properly under trial scenarios they assume this is great news and that vaccines arenāt far off. I think the contrast is that the vaccinations will be indeed far off for the gen-pop. Should successfull trials be acceptable and pass, it still needs to go into production, then start rolling out and distributing. I think this will likely only happen in a year or two at least.
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Under normal circumstances, sure. But the COVID vaccine teams are all aiming at applying for emergency use exemptions with the FDA, which speeds everything up massively. This vaccine will have the necessary data for that exemption by week 3 of November. - https://www.pfizer.com/news/hot-topics/albert_bourla_discusses_covid_19_vaccine_efficacy_results
Also bear in mind that Pfizer has production and distribution infrastructure already set up for their existing suite of meds. Relatively easy to swop out a box of blue pills in a truck for a vial of vaccine.
My opinion:
This pushes production and distribution ramp up to Q1 2021, with steady state production likely by mid 2021, if all the tests theyāre busy with are successful. This also gels nicely with the 12-18 months estimates that were given around March/April of this year.
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So our household (myself, wife and toddler) have been quite coughy-ill and fatigued for more than a week now. After seeing a GP last week and getting loads of meds, weāre not feeling any better. So weāre sitting at the medical centre right now waiting to get COVID tests done. Not quite sure what I want the outcome to be thoughā¦ If weāve come this far in a bit more than a week, I suspect weāre over the worst of what it has to offer if we test positive.
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