{"id":1466,"date":"2020-03-27T15:57:11","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T21:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/?p=1466"},"modified":"2020-07-20T16:11:53","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T22:11:53","slug":"covid-19-experience-working-from-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/covid-19-experience-working-from-home\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 experience working from home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like tens or hundreds of thousands of others, I am working from home while the coronavirus pandemic<\/a> sweeps the United States and the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

Here are a few observations about my experience working from home. I’m a software engineer, and I realize that my experience is different from that of hardware engineers, QA folks, customer solutions agents, teachers, and even from other software engineers.<\/p>\n

Sleep<\/strong>. The first several days, I worked from my bedroom, which has a great view of the outside world, but I found it difficult to sleep restfully at night. Once my wife shut down her in-home preschool, I moved to working from one of the two preschool rooms, and now I sleep quite well at night. It’s good to have a separate work place.<\/p>\n

Exercise<\/strong>. Working from home, I feel more fidgety… maybe I move around less, because there are fewer meetings, and fewer impromptu discussions. So I feel a strong need to get out of the house and work in the yard (pruning, since it’s spring), take a walk or ride a bike.<\/p>\n

Convenience<\/strong>. The kitchen and bathroom are closer. If I want to take a nap, no problem — I’ve got a comfortable bed nearby. Taking a walk around the block is a piece of cake — the front door isn’t that far away compared to when I’m working in the office.<\/p>\n

Interruptions<\/strong>. Most of my children are teenagers, and believe it or not, I have fewer interruptions at home than I do at work. When my children are doing their remote school, two of them are in the same room as me, with headphones in their ears, and it’s so quiet that I can hear a pin drop.<\/p>\n

Social<\/strong>. I enjoy the more frequent face to face interactions with my wife and children. I miss the face to face interactions with my coworkers. Video conferencing is a great invention, and yet it’s not the same as being there.<\/p>\n

Communication<\/strong>. There are a lot fewer impromptu hallway discussions with coworkers, and more with family members. I’m not sure if we’re better at communicating with slack now that we’re all remote or not.<\/p>\n

Internet<\/strong>. We have excellent wireless internet service. Since our entire family is working\/schooling from home, we notice much more quickly when there’s network latency or poor quality.<\/p>\n

Up to now, we’ve used a Disney Circle for parental control, and we knew it caused problems on a nearly weekly basis (it does ARP poisoning of a local network), especially for managed devices. With remote school, Circle started breaking things on a daily basis, so I turned Circle off.<\/p>\n

I found that 5 Ghz WiFi on the main floor of our house doesn’t penetrate the floor and walls to the basement, and so I pulled my old ASUS WiFi router out of storage, put it in access point mode in our basement, installed a firmware update, and wired it to the router upstairs. Now I get better speeds and connectivity.<\/p>\n

Commute<\/strong>. I had a great commute before, but it’s even better now. With so many people staying home, the air is cleaner.<\/p>\n

Productivity<\/strong>. My productivity ebbs and flows at work, and the same is true while working from home. Overall, I feel a bit less productive working from home. I’m more inclined to put my Slack app in “do not disturb” mode when I finish working.<\/p>\n

Update: It took three weeks before I settled into a good flow of working from home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like tens or hundreds of thousands of others, I am working from home while the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the United States and the rest of the world. Here are a few observations about my experience working from home. I’m a software engineer, and I realize that my experience is different from that of hardware engineers, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “COVID-19 experience working from home”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1466"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1498,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1466\/revisions\/1498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}