Gotham Beacon

I was planning on writing a long essay to review my personal experiences throughout 2020. Yet, it was too much to unpack and analyze in the end. As such, I’ll be publishing a series of small write-ups on topics that were a mainstay during this past year. In them, I’ll go through how they affected me, and also do a bit of digging into the past. To me, 2020 presented itself as a weirdly fitting scenario to reflect on past experiences, and dissect how they changed my way of observing and interacting with the world.

Past experiences

Today’s topic is work. I’m no stranger to working from home, and I quite prefer it to the standard office routine. I have a solid routine, and I’m much more productive at home than I could ever be at an office. It doesn’t help that commuting in London is a mess. If you’re not at a walking distance of your workplace, any commute is going to be a hot, crowded, and stressful mess.

Over the past nine years, I’ve worked for four different companies. Two of them allowed me to work from home (usually for three days per week), but the other two imposed restrictions. One of these didn’t provide any work from home scheme. They stood by their belief that true work and collaboration only happens at the office. It’s always nice to interact with other people in person, even if it’s only to have a cup of coffee and throw in some banter. But the illusion of collaboration only happening at the office is just that: an illusion. If people spend the majority of the day avoiding human contact, it doesn’t matter if they’re sitting in the same physical space. With the ongoing lockdowns, I hope the memo got through. Working from home doesn’t prevent collaboration, creativity, or work from happening. I also hope everyone over there is doing well, even those that were unprofessional enough to lead me to seek greener pastures.

There was one other company where I split my daily hours between the office and home. That turned out to be a terrible experience for several reasons:

• Some of the people at the company were blatantly incompetent and unprofessional
• Unlike what these people thought, the company wasn’t prepared to deal with remote employees
• The commute was quite bad, both in logistics and duration. It was hard to synchronize the schedules of different public transports when the time tables kept changing (courtesy of TfL)
• The added pressure of doing the school runs, and synchronizing them with the commute, was exhausting
• This had a measurable impact on my productivity.

To make matters worse, I found myself doing work that I didn’t want to do. It’s no wonder that my tenure only lasted for three months. It was one of the most valuable learning experiences I’ve ever had (for the worst possible reasons).

Company

At my current company, we agreed from the start that I would only commute to the office once or twice per week. This changed when the UK government finally acknowledged that the pandemic was real and sweeping through the islands¹. At that point, everyone moved to a full remote scheme.

Unfortunately, it was a hard year for the company. When the first lockdown started in the UK, we agreed to reduce our work hours and take a pay cut for six months to help keep the lights on. We closed our office and I took in a massive inventory of older hardware that we wanted to salvage. Over the following months, I split the majority of it between work colleagues. The last batch went to our data scientist for work purposes. That was a massive relief, as I was able to reclaim quite a bit of storage around the house. Also, having less hardware at hand makes me less prone to dabble with ideas of having servers to run “stuff”. Alas, I still have two functional CPU + motherboard bundles and I’ll eventually get rid of one of them. It’s useful to have a spare working computer around (trust me, I’ve used it a few times already for very specific purposes).

In the end, we all went over and beyond the line of duty by putting in more hours than we should’ve. There was a strong commitment to save the company and our jobs. In late September, the company was acquired, making it a bittersweet conclusion to the whole situation. Some people were let go, but the company bounced back and we’re stable at this point. The main changes were:

• I stepped into the role of acting CTO (my official title is “head of development”)
• Took on increased responsibilities in dealing with clients, managing projects, and dealing with other administrative/corporate tasks
• Remained as the only full-time developer
• Added the DevOps work to my already extensive stack of roles.

In January of this year, we re-hired an ex-employee and that was an amazing boost on the development front. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. There are some ongoing issues that I’ll touch upon in a later opportunity.