Working from home
19 April 2025One major effect of the Covid-19 pandemic was to open the pandora's box of widespread remote working, which historically I have not been fond of and have always had various reservations; even when I worked for a major corporation that pre-Covid had a then-generous two days per week work-from-home policy I did not use it that much. In fact back in June 2020 I used my questionable essential worker status as an excuse to go into the office when in reality it was completely unnecessary for me to be on-site, but having being forced to get used to work-from-home I eventually lost the appetite for the “old” way of commuting daily. This was not helped by how long the buses took even though there was little other traffic on the road.
Four years down the line I now consider fully remote working to be a personal disaster and with my current company I am now back to five days a week in the office as standard. This is the story of how my views changed during Covid-19 lockdown in response to circumstances but my preferences have reverted to what I held historically.
Historical views
While at university although I did a lot of work on my own computers and at least in my undergraduate days I was a serious workaholic for whom 12+ hour days were not uncommon, I also had a preference for doing things in the department's labs. This was helped by living only half a mile from the department but even in my first year when this was not the case I still went in a lot more than many classmates. Somewhere along the time I developed an association between not coming into the department and work-shy laziness, which later evolved into a negative view of work-from-home. From memory it was only the last twelve or so months of my Ph.D when I was frantically writing up the dissertation that I worked predominantly from my own place, and that was a time I do not look back at with any fondness.
(The only university lab picture I could find..)
The other side of the coin was the extent the university relied on people using their own equipment and space for doing work because provision for these by the institution was woefully inadequate. One of my major objections at the time was how some courses de-facto required students to pirate software in order to get work done due to the lack of workstations and/or software licences, and this was at a time when a higher-end computer cost more than annual accommodation fees. Social space disappeared in favour of lecture theatres and study hot-desks, with rising student intakes not being matched by proportionally larger computing labs, and if there is one thing that was not a priority it was how students felt. When I read about companies ditching dedicated desks in favour of hot-desking and shared workspaces all I see is the same penny-pinching mindset that the universities had.
(..well almost - this was after I left)
Personally I was one of those who preferred working in the lab evenings in preference to working from my room and in the process noted a correlation between coming into the labs and doing well out of the course. Back then everyone could see everyone else's coursework marks, and that included an indication of those flagged up for submitting work late, so everyone on the course had a good idea of how everyone else was doing. Exam results at the time were supposed to actually be secret but I was one of those who was “made aware” of those intranet pages being unsecured, and long story short those who failed to come into labs & lectures tended to be those who failed exams. As a result I left university with the view that a good proportion of people do not have the personal discipline required for work-from-home.
Actual working from home
In the past I worked for a multi-national company that permitted work-from-home two days per week, which although was certainly a “nice to have” was also something that I never took full advantage of because it never felt quite right. A large proportion of the times I did option to work from home was when there were issues with weather and/or public transport, or there was a some need for me to be in my flat such as a delivery, and in most of these cases I would still go into the office at some point in the day. A major reason for this was my desire to use the on-site gym which I considered a more important benefit and many of thee days I did not go in I would not rank as productive.
When the Covid work-from-home order came through in March 2020 I was living somewhere that was too small for basic living let alone staying there 14/7 and working as well. Having a table of about a metre diameter that was my desk and dining table was a recipe for disaster, which includes two keyboards destroyed by spilt liquids, and some scissors that accidentally shorted out the power terminals of hardware that was out of its case still have the weld marks. All things considered I suspected it was just a matter of time before something else got damaged, and the fear of this further eroded an already deteriorating mindset.
The chaotic switch to remote working was not a good introduction either, with the complete breakdown between work and life taking a long time to get used to — having no escape from work which at the time I was doing a monstrously difficult reverse-engineering task in itself would bring with it a great personal cost I have yet to recover from. There is practically nothing positive I can recall from that second quarter of 2020 and am devoid of any incentive to even try looking back at it.
The switch to remote
When the twelve-month mark passed with no end in sight remote working had de-facto become the way of doing things and it was clear that I would have to continue adapting to it. Realistically working from home needed a dedicated desk and workstation, especially with the embedded development I was doing that involved having loads of hardware wired up, and ideally a dedicated room. Upon moving back to the UK I stayed at my parents place where an unused bedroom had been specially redecorated and converted into a study, complete with an ethernet socket that terminated some Cat.5e cabling I crawled through the attic to install. In practice it was not quite a purely “work” space since among other things my unpacked elecronics stuff was kept in there and with my brother's dog resident downstairs I used it rather than my personal computer, but compared to before it still felt like a proper workspace I could step away from if needed.
At some point I decided that switching to a job that allowed full-time remote working was the only way I could make progress on the professional side of my new life, because it allowed me to decouple changing companies from the migration progress that had been plagued by uncertainties. There was no desire to start commuting again when being back in the office reminded me how much of a strain it was, and while I had serious doubts whether remote working was really the thing for the long-term future it was at the time the reality I was stuck with. Not even being sure whether the UK was where I wanted to be long-term it did also give the notional option of being foot-loose.
Miss the rigidity
By late-2022 I had more or less concluded fully remote working was turning into a failure, and ironically it was due to absence of the rigidity imposed by office work that many other people actually dislike. With rebuilding of my social life taking a hit from all the train strikes and sorting out a personal life not even on the radar I desperately needed some sort of structure to my life as a whole but was not getting it, and with no end in sight came with it questions on how long my energy could really hold out. Compounding this was my unsuccessful attempts at creating some sort of work-life seperation so my whole apartment ended up feeling like a place of work that I felt the need to get away from. This was why I re-kitted the previous office room and preferentially spent weekdays working from there.
It was an afternoon on a cold-ish day that I finally snapped, the trigger itself a minor momentary frustration but then my energy levels hit zero. The way I slumped forward in despondence broke several casters on the chair and although I had replacements close at hand the loud cracking sound was an ironically accurate representation of how I was feeling. Being alone in the house made me wonder about the extent that the job was my life, and by this stage I was half-hearted about it because it had diverged significantly from my desired career trajectory. Looking back my underlying mental condition was probably sufficently bad that it warrented taking medical leave.
At this point an old friend had been trying for some time to recruit me so I decided to go down the contracting route but in practice this only resulted in a hand-full of side projects. Being a start-up where where work is feast-famine doing gigs on the side like this was not a concern and because of this there was an intention to switch over entirely to project-based contracting. However this was derailed because the intended sources of contacts were mostly down-stream of government procurement which got got smashed by the incoming government, and plans for Outside-IR35 were never put into action because of how long it was taking to sort out a company bank account. The people I had to deal with at Tide were so bad that I just deleted the app rather than read any messages related to closing of the account.
Back to PAYE at the office
Ultimately I felt that the contracting route was not working out and decided to move on, but with all the big-tech and banking cut-backs in the greater London region competition for any sort of tech job was very stiff. Eventually I secured an opportunity in Manchester and looking back getting that role was Last Chance Saloon as far as working in Britain was concerned, as shortly after accepting it I was called to the final-round interview with the CEO for a consultancy in Belgium and I have no doubt they will have offered. I also withdrew from a third-round interview for Qualcomm in Cork.
I have yet to figure out the whole story of how the company operates as some people seem to have been fully remote from the start but there a definite bias towards people being in the office and this suits me perfectly — the office is for work and my apartment is for living, with mandatory office attendance being instrumental in me applying in the first place. In fact with my apartment being only six minutes walk from the office any sort of regular remote working borders on pointless and so far have only done it three times, and the one time it was my own choice I was off the afternoon anyway.