Here’s to another casual talk session between me and two other members of the Hubton Family. This time, I talked with our web developers about their experience of working from home.
As of the publication of this piece, we have been working from home for about three months. Both our dev guys agree that the work itself is not too different from working from the office. Some external factors, such as the workplace ambiance, physical conditions, and mood are different, for sure. However, those have not hindered our code-writing-related work at all. Kudos to our dev team!
So, this has been quite an effortless transition for us. One of our developers is used to remote working, and the other believes his work is not really affected by mood since writing codes do not require a certain kind of mood for it to take place. Let’s dig deeper into how it feels like to work as a web developer in isolation.
More Control and Free Time
Naturally, having to work from home (no commuting time) and not being able to be outside too much have given us more time for ourselves. Our dev team has been using this extra time to put in more resting time. There are different manifestations of it, like snacking and hanging around with family members, but it’s been a good use of our extra time.
Best Thing about Working from Home
As mentioned above, it’s really good to have more time for ourselves. This especially because, in a world with a global pandemic, we are not just dealing with our daily problems but also so many uncertainties. Having the time to spend more with ourselves and family members are useful coping mechanisms for our developers.
On a more tangible note, the freedom to work with whatever physical setup is such a refreshing idea. No shower? Quick dance break between work? Writing codes while cuddled up in bed? The possibilities are endless!
Worst Thing About Working from Home
I have been suggesting that everything is smooth sailing for our developers—may not be entirely wrong—but it doesn’t mean they don’t face any challenges at all! It has been mentioned several times in our discussions that starting the day is one of the most difficult things to do. So much willpower is required to do it when there is a lack of physical cues to support mental readiness.
The urge to procrastinate here is also something we have to face, but we deal with it with proper planning and management, just like our designers.
Biggest Lessons from Working from Home
As we pass each day and learn from it, our developers come up with two biggest lessons the get from working from home: Time management and maintaining trust.
When we face our daily challenges alone, we learned to be more disciplined in our time management. We get better at organizing what that we have to do and when to do them. This lesson came naturally with ‘practice’, and the implication of it that we have to learn to self-motive. When we can do it, we will get more ‘practice’ and get better every day.
In addition to that, we also learn more about maintaining trust. It’s a unique condition where we work as a team but we’re all technically in solitude. Therefore, we came up with our own personalized strategies so that we can maintain productivity and avoid chaos for the team.
Verdict
I put a quick poll for our dev team where they can score between the office and their house for work. Please note, however, that this is just for fun because we only have two participants (ha!).
Out of 100, the average score for working from home and from the office respectively is 60.5 and 39.5. Yes, there are perks to working from home, but being together with our teammates are also very helpful in teamwork.
Interestingly enough, I personally believe that we are getting even closer to a working model where we get to combine remote working and office working!
Work-Life Balance
There is an interesting contrast between our web developers’ work-from-home conditions. One stays with his family and the other alone. I was curious to see how this difference affects their work. As it turned out, it didn’t.
At first, I thought this is nothing worth shedding a light on. But, when I think about it, this says a lot about how our developers are approaching this situation with such a stoic approach. They both just accept and move along with the situation. Yes, the living condition is nothing new, but integrating it as a full part of the working condition is nothing easy.
Food for Thoughts
“Working from home is the best opportunity to get to know more about ourselves and where we are heading next. The technology in web development is rapidly changing and, to be in this field, we must be very adaptable to changes and be willing to keep learning. Therefore, as web developers, the opportunity to work from home can be used to learn about new technologies and further learn about ourselves with regards to whether or not we have what it takes to be a web developer.” –Faris Hanugraha, Front-End Developer at Hubton Indonesia