For the past 10 years, I have been working from home. Up until 2021, I would have insisted it was the way. In 2020, I even wrote a blog post about how to prep yourself for WFH to make your environment conducive to productivity and efficiency.

I feel like I’m at the exact sweet spot to be writing this - I’ve been doing this long enough to know the reality of remote work but not along enough to where I have forgotten what it was like to work in an office.

I consider myself an introvert. As such, I had a lot of the same ideas on the benefits of WFH as most others would. No more small-talk, more focus time, less distractions, flexibility, etc.

At Aetna, I’ve been working remotely for the entire 8 years I’ve been here.

When I worked for my last two jobs before Aetna, I worked in an office for a year at each and then requested some WFH.

Before my current job, the WFH made sense since I was moving from Dallas (where the office was) to Austin. Management didn’t love the idea of WFH in general but I had a solid reputation and they trusted me so I was granted the request. Looking back on it, unfortunately, I don’t doubt going WFH caused me to eventually burn out and quit but at the time, I didn’t realize how big of a role it had played in the end. That’s a separate story, though.

And before that company, I had worked at a startup where the engineers became good friends of mine. Since I enjoyed the culture, I ended up creating more of a hybrid routine after my first year. I think it worked out well to balance WFH when I wanted to focus (or have more perceived control over my distractions) and be in office when I felt I needed collaboration.

Back to Aetna. When I started, we used to do in-person quarterly planning meetings but the rest was 100% remote. Our last in-person meeting was in January 2020. During 2020, due to the shutdown, everyone went remote.

the serendipity

During most of 2020, the company was callibrating to a situation that no one really knew how long it’d last. We had to do “online quarterly planning.” I was pregnant most of 2020 so I appreciated not having to travel especially during the third trimester. However, by the second quarterly planning session in 2021 - having had the baby and returned from my maternity leave - I was already missing the in-person planning sessions.

Those lunch or in-between-meetings conversations with coworkers where we’d actually get to know each other as people. Actually feeling connected in a way no digital platform can offer.

Picking up on how others truly feel about the things being said. No online meeting or text chat can capture that.

Those things that fall onto your ears serendipitously.

In those natural moments where we are walking past a group of server engineers that were talking through how they tested their APIs before handoff only for us to realize we had assumed something different and realized we needed to take their testing into account.

While talking to the web tech lead after a meeting, the web architect and a senior engineer saw him and came in. I learned a lot during that time - what mattered at a higher level to web leadership, how other more senior engineers were seeing the work, etc. As much as like to imagine this conversation will happen on the Slack “watercooler” channel… it just doesn’t. I would have not thought to directly message these two individuals either. It was a nice coincidence that helped my career.

connections

I was definitely one of those people that dreaded ice breakers and team dinners. Ice breakers can feel cheesy and unauthentic - we don’t want to be too serious or too silly so we have to find the middle ground that’s light enough yet not too light. However, as I’ve found, these small things can lead to genuine connection when you can move the conversation forward. And the only way to do that is by practicing.

Two of the engineers I worked with at the startup attended my small destination wedding years after we had worked together. They are not only two of the best engineers I’ve worked with but two of the best people I have met.

How did we get to know each other? There was a kitchen at our startup office where we would chat about the snacks, tech… and gradually about the TV shows we were watching and then about our lives outside of work. Gradually, all of the engineers would start talking about which restaurant to eat lunch at as a group. From there, we started going to get dinner or drinks after work. This is not to suggest that this could happen with every group of individuals but this definitely wouldn’t have developed with a remote-only team. We worked closer together and knew how to speak to each other and dial in on each other at the office because of those collections of moments. It brought us together and created a great engineering culture at the company.

A lot of remote work conversation ranges from either all business to trying to be light hearted but no one is ever sure if their tone comes across ‘right’ so there’s over-correcting or just some people that prefer not to talk (which is an easy enough option when you’re not face-to-face). Even with most of us having the camera on - we all know half of us are multi-tasking - or attempting to. There’s no expectation that we have everyones’ attention.

BUT are we more productive?

If this is what it comes down to, it sucks. It’s subjective. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Pandemic remote working was a special circumstance where many got a little bit of the initial “enjoyment” of no commute, no dress code, etc that made them feel like they could get more accomplished. I’ve wondered if the quality of the work remained - has anyone measured that? The same as vacationing in a city vs actually living there. Everyone thinks WFH sounds great but almost to the extent where they think it’s less of a job because it’s done from home. Nope. I’m a responsible adult. I am not going to the theater in the middle of a workday. And I’m balancing work and life like anyone else just differently. I’ve woken up at 2am and run over to my laptop to try to resolve a problem I got stuck on during office hours. I mean, all my work stuff is right there and no one is online to bother me so it happens. On those days, sure, more productive. Those are not the norm, though. And I really hope no company sees that as a selling point. Ew.

I think it’s good to slow down sometimes. There’s personal fulfillment in deep diving, understanding, and feeling confident in learning using our own brains to process. I have no idea why people want to so easily offload that. Slow the f*ck down.

final thoughts

Honestly, for my specific role, where I collaborate with many coworkers (design, server engineering, architecture, product, content, a11y, etc) and personally like to feel like I’m putting out something beneficial to others - I think all the fine-tuning (the stuff that gets our web platform gets awards) in the end comes from the engineering culture built on those quarterly in-person meetings we used to have. Enough of us remember that. The culture for web engineers is stronger when we get to know each other and trust either. We don’t need to be best friends but some real in-person bonding is where real conversation and connection is found. If we didn’t care about the features and each other to an extent, it simply wouldn’t be as good. I don’t think we’d be motivated to keep quality high without feeling some unity amongst ourselves. Not because we are lazy or undisciplined… we’re just perfectly human.

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1. yes, I had just finished reading “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age” which made me reflect a lot on my work situation.

2. I wrote different parts of this at different times over the past week but don’t want to drag it on anymore so running the github action to publish this and let the chips fall where they may.