Outreachy Week 8 – Week 9: Remote or In-Office Working

07-29-2019

The Week 9 blog prompt recommended by Outreachy was to write about my career goals. To be honest, this is a really hard topic for me. As long as a career path involves some form of coding, creating and learning new things, I’m willing to take it on. The best situation could be that it is also doing something good for the society. This might be because that “something that I am too passionate for” doesn’t yet exist in my life. For now, I wish I’d still be coding 5 years from now. It’s just that simple. The only thing that I would like to see improvement upon is gender balance for this industry.

As for working environment, I would like to share some thoughts after having experienced both extremes of totally remote work and complete in-office work. There are a lot of articles out there comparing the pros and cons. Here are just my opinions on the time spent not working:

Dozing off
Socializing

Table of Contents

Dozing off

Our concentration time is limited and there definitely will be times when we doze off a bit. Just a list of things that I had done before in both places. I think I’m being too honest here 🙁

Office:

Browsing random pages
Checking useless e-mails
Talk to someone else also dozing off
Using social apps (e.g. Messenger)

Hoping people don’t think I’m doing these things for the whole day.

Remote:

Cook something to eat
Laundry or other house chores
Watch videos
Have a German lesson for an hour

I actually don’t take breaks between meals when working remotely.

In conclusion, I think dozing off in an office really really fits the definition of purely wasting time. You have peer pressure to look productive the whole 8 hours which just simply isn’t human. The things I do when I’m working remotely are actually things done after work from office. So I’ll give a vote for remote here.

Socializing

Office:

I had colleagues that I would love to go out with outside of work when I had an office job. One of the reasons that I stayed in a job is because of my colleagues. They were wonderful people and also great “friends”.

Remote:

The main means of communication is either text or video chat. Usually, they are for “work” purposes. I think my mentors are already kind enough to be there to support me whenever I’m stuck and I’m grateful for that! Don’t want to let them feel like they need to spend that much time on me. Although this might be different than “real” remote work, but I think it probably won’t be too distant from what I’m experiencing right now. I wouldn’t really want to specifically open a video chat just to talk about our daily lives through it.

I would vote for an office environment in this case since you can work and make friends at the same time which is pretty convenient for an introvert like me. If I don’t feel like making new friends, then probably I would choose remote work. I think I probably will change my preference as I get older.

Last but not least, as always my progress report for debci.