“Remote is the future of work”

Tweets the IT consultant from his bathroom; preparing himself for the next 8 hours of Zoom meetings with bursts of intermittent coding.

His $3000 laptop sitting on a pile of books in his bedroom facing an Ikea bookshelf carefully arranged to showcase his favourite titles at the edges of his webcam frame. Well-known industry classics such as:

• The Mythical Man-Month
• The 1-Hour Workweek
• How to Win Friends and Merge Pull Requests
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Half The Work in Twice the Time
• Problematic Programmer
• Clean(ish) Code

He’s read at least some of them.

Feeling fresh and prepared, he sits down on the kitchen chair he’s set up in the bedroom with a fresh cup of expensive coffee.

After the appropriate amount of secure two-factor-authentication, he pulls up the Jira board to check stories assigned to him:

9 tasks assigned in the sprint backlog, 4 in progress. 1 to review. Great! He’s been very productive yesterday.

At 09:00 he joins the video call.

– “Good Morning! Can you hear me?”

– “Do you hear me?”

– “Is everyone here? Should we wait for Marcus to join?”

– “Let’s wait another 2 minutes and then we can start”

– “Should I share my screen?”

…and so on.

After 32 minutes in the 15-minute daily call, he feels inspired and has almost a full hour to put in some coding time.

docker-compose up

He opens his code editor to the project he’s working on. The laptop fan makes a groaning sound as the integrated development environment struggles to open the project. The solution to a task he was working on yesterday is still clear on his mind. He goes to work.

Another 10 minutes later a team member asks him to review a pull request. He drops what he was doing and starts reviewing his colleague’s code.

He finds the pull request is not ready to be merged.

At 10:20 he gets a notification on his phone about the next team meeting. This one is a training session called by the DevOps engineer who has introduced another new tool to the continuous integration pipeline.

With Zoom ready to go for the next meeting, he pours himself another cup of coffee and waits for the meeting to begin.

“Can you hear me? …”

… and so forth.

The meeting lasts until 12:00. It’s lunchtime.

He brings his laptop to the kitchen with him, microwaves a plastic container of yesterday’s pasta dinner leftovers and sits down to eat and browse the news.

Something about a global pandemic. They’re talking about the risks of opening schools and workplaces again. He tweets his thoughts while having his lunch.

“Now that we’re all forced to work from home, will companies finally realize how much more efficient remote asynchronous work is? #COVID19”

He decides to get a head start on some work and takes only a 25-minute lunch break to get back to the bedroom to work on his JIRA story:

VIDCO-19: As a user I want to search for products by name

He works on a list view. He feels productive.

At 13:00 he receives a Slack message. A team member has sent him a Zoom link for a remote coffee break.

Ah yes, the team had decided to have some casual video chats in order to keep everyone’s spirits up while in isolation. He joins the call but keeps secretly working in the background. Nobody notices.

At 13:30 There’s a company-wide video call. An update about the pandemic situation. Hopefully nobody is getting laid off.

“These are hard times for the company.”

The call starts with a generic update on savings measures and a poorly organised Q&A session using an online poll. There’s nowhere near enough time to answer all the questions submitted.

The call goes overtime and ends at 15:36. No layoffs announced.

The next meeting already started 6 minutes ago. But everyone else is late too so it’s probably OK.

Everyone in the team joins the afternoon grooming session lead by the team’s Agile coach who insists on trying out some new video chat tool.

Nobody’s microphone works so they switch back over to Zoom.

“Can you hear me now?”

The software team are asked to estimate each new story in the backlog. A frustrating exercise due to there being not enough time to have a meaningful discussion about the possible solutions.

Somehow the team assign story points to each new story. Every story ends up getting a 3 story point estimate.

The meeting ends at 17:00. It was the last meeting scheduled for today. The IT consultant finally gets his focused work time.

At 21:15 that same evening, feeling happy with his work, he submits a pull request, moves a subtask to the review column, and shares his thoughts to his followers:

“Did we ever really need an office? #COVID19 #remotelife”