500 Days of Work From Home
By looking at the title I’m sure you can guess what this article is about. And yes, you are right, it’s about my “work from home” journey during this Covid-19 pandemic. Hi, I’m Sakib, a Software Engineer currently working from home in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The whole country was in lockdown, well technically the whole world was in some sort of lockdown most of the time during these 500 days. Right now, the whole lockdown thing and working from home feels like a normal thing, as we all say the new normal.
Back in March 2020, our company moved all of its operations to the “work from home” culture and it has been 500 days since we are working from home. Covid-19 is still an ongoing danger and it might take ages for this nightmare to be over. Initially, I thought we would be working from home for only a few weeks and in the worst case maybe for a few months. However, I was very wrong and I don’t know whether things will ever be back the way it was at the beginning of 2020.
Nowadays when I think about how life was before Covid-19, I realize how many things I had taken for granted. We used to have both breakfast and lunch at the office and the food was delicious. I miss that very much along with the chit-chat with my awesome colleagues. Sometimes it feels even unreal because of all the things that happened in the last one and half years. Back when everything was normal I had to wake up pretty early, go to work and after work, I used to hit the gym or go for a game with colleagues. On weekends it was for tours or hangouts or maybe just sleeping half-day long.
Fast forward to now, I usually wake up right before the first meeting of my day. And the endless stream of meetings continues one after another. Some days I even have to eat while being in a meeting because there is literally no time in between. On the plus side, I do have very flexible work hours so it has its perks. Other than the meetings, I get to choose when I want to work, there’s no fixed timetable and I’m loving this. Moreover, I get to save a huge amount of time of my day by not having to travel to work. During office hours all roads of Dhaka are jam-packed and sitting through those traffic jam for hours is like a torture. Avoiding traffic and saving precious time is certainly making my days more productive.
I also get to invest more time on my learning and gaining valuable skills through online courses. Among all the courses that I did during this time, the most significant one would be a course on Introduction to Quantum Computing that was sponsored by IBM and the course was taught by Quantum Scientists from both MIT and Oxford. The course consisted of 2 semesters that took 8 long months. I did online courses before but this time I completed this course with 100% marks and it would have been pretty impossible to achieve all this if I was not working from home.
On the other hand, my personal life has changed significantly during this whole pandemic. I got married and spending all the time with my beloved wife has changed me a lot and made me a better person than I was before. Waking up to her beautiful face in the morning makes me feel great about my day. A warm hug in between a busy day goes a long way. Movie nights are more fun now because of her and having a partner with my late-night snacks is a blessing.
Some days I really miss going to the office and working side by side with my team. Mostly on the days when all the engineers are discussing with a virtual whiteboard and brainstorming about potential solutions. Virtually everything is cool but the physical presence of my teammates and the physical presence of the whiteboard during technical discussions is one of the things I miss the most. There is no doubt that we all face a lot of confusion during these challenging times and a great amount of miscommunication happens as well. Effectively communicating with the team mates can solve this issue and advice from senior team-mates are always helpful.
Another massive change that I encountered during this pandemic is the lack of interpersonal interactions with my colleagues. Previously in 2020 and earlier, I got to interact with most of the employees of my company in different places like Canteen, Kitchen, Sports ground and rooftop barbecues. Although everything is now virtual and those interactions are almost non-existent, I badly miss those conversations with the known faces from work.
Work from home is here to stay and this Covid-19 pandemic actually proved that working from home is also productive. In my opinion, effective communication is the key to making the work from home culture a success. Even when things go back to the old normal I would love to work from home for a couple of days per week.