Working from home: my hate and my insanity...

The whole COVID-19 pandemic has caused a paradigm shift in terms of what working is going to look like for a long time. Even when things are back in control, we'll still find ourselves being home employees. Employers are taking advantage of this to perhaps save money on office costs  Many venues are closing because their response to COVID-19 has put them into abject poverty or even in bankruptcy. Restaurants, coffee shops, gyms and other places that thrive on a large customer base to function are closing; especially the small ones. 

Working from your domicile means all the home distractions are available to us. I hear of friends with low workloads using Caffeine or Amphetamine to give the illusion that they're working while in reality they're taking naps, watching shows and gaming. My current job is more fast paced and I don't have that luxury though admittedly I've slacked off a bit.

There's a contrast between sitting next to your manager and staying at home with all the freedom you want. You can pretend to work and extend deadlines making your work seemingly more difficult. I noticed my coworkers including my teammates taking their time on tickets that normally take 2 days done in 2 weeks instead. Everyone is playing the lie.

The isolation is something that drives me really nuts. The few meetings and no real interaction makes for a very lonely experience. Instead of walking to a friend’s desk for some help, now you have to send emails and schedule a meeting.

I was hoping to find a way to have company through a shared office space. However, I was alone there as few dared to put themselves at risk. I didn't have the company I was looking for to discuss random subjects and have that human interaction. Worst part, it was unusually expensive no matter the location. It would make things hard to afford things.

I haven't tried coffee shops but these seem more busy. Apparently, these kinds of locations increase creativity and production due to the chatter, less distractions and of course your boss not staring at you. Universities might be a good location too but it seems no one is going there.

What pains me so much is how much time we spend at home because of remote work. Although I argued in my first blog post that we work too much, we'd at least have more time for walks and whatever else refreshes us. However, an extra 8 hours at home just seems too much for me. We’re trapped because we have to be online all the time and our bosses expect instantaneous responses, otherwise they might think we’re unproductive. I try to do things outside of home when I can but it's hard during these lockdown days.

I'd like your opinion on how you cope with working from home and how you stay sane stuck in front of your laptop at home without any breaks. Leave comments.

Isolation...

These uncertain times have driven me nuts. I’m stuck at home no what I’m doing whether it’s working remotely or talking to loved ones. All you get is virtual interaction, but it’s not the same. You can’t feel people vibes behind a screen, it’s just a flat representation of them.

I have to stay home all the time. I want to see my family and sometimes I take risks even though I shouldn’t see them. I’m tempted to go to my friends’ domiciles. I want to give gifts but they might be contaminated. I don’t know.

I can’t host my meetup anymore. Other meetups that I join are all online instead of being around a table. My part-time driving job has come to a halt because everything non-essential has been closed and people are trapped at home. I get no riders and I’m scared they’ll pollute my car with the illness. Your appointments are virtual too, and even worse sometimes on the phone. How are they going to see your facial expressions and body language to know how you really are. How will they feel your pain when all you have is sound.

Going outside is scary, it feels like a taking a risk everytime and I have to admit I’ve taken big ones. It makes me anxious. People don’t seem to know how to protect themselves or others. Few have read what the experts have recommended to us. I feel unsafe because the rules aren’t being followed.

You never know when someone has it, maybe I do but I’m not reacting to the monster. Someone else may be the same but the reaction on me might be severe enough to send me for admission.

People with conditions are getting tired of all of this. Even healthy people are developing anxiety and stress because of this mess. I want my life to go back to normal and everyone does too. Even health care workers are getting sick of all the extreme protections they have to do, and even with that, people get hit with it anyways.

The timelines are uncertain and picking the wrong time might cause everything to spread again. Maybe in a few months, or next year, no one can give me an idea. How do we control something that spreads so quickly.

Scientists are doing their research to find treatments and other forms of protection from this disease. Yet it is not something that is discovered in a few months. There’s a ton of paperwork and trials needed to get things approved. It’s not going to be tomorrow.

I can’t put on my calendar when we’ll all be free again because no one knows when.

I'm afraid to write about my personal life here.

My blog has explored a huge mess of subjects from the technologically related, to the automotive focused, to some obscure aspects of gaming and even a few laughs. However, one thing I always avoid was talking about my personal life, I’m too scared and here’s why.

At one point, I had an extremely long blog post about some misadventure in my life that was very personal and honestly revealed secrets about my past and my present condition. I decided to eventually remove it despite its popularity and relegated it to an unlinked part of my website only accessible by a certain URL. I only share it with those who are curious or in the appropriate communities.

For many, their blog is a journal of their life; what they’re struggling with. Like me, they’re brave enough to put their full name on it but there’s a really big caveat: Employers.

My entire perspective can be altered and skewed by those who creep up the most on me, those who are considering to hire me. I don’t hide my website on my resume, it’s right there on the corner. I can see in my analytics when a potential employer browses through my website and honestly they spend more time than the average reader.

My blog has an angry vibe to it, which is honestly my primary emotion before I fall into anxiety and depression. I consider myself a vocal and passionate person and whatever I’m going to write is going to be worded strongly and boldly.

I want to write about my life desperately yet I’m afraid that those who will guide my career will judge me for who I truly am: a broken and troubled person. I’ll be thrown out of the choice pool because I decided to express my freedom and complain about what ails me.

I didn’t realize how much employers search you from your LinkedIn profile to your Facebook account to anything else with your name. My name and username show my website as one of the first results in addition to other searches. If they could get a hold of your reddit account and dating profiles they would.

I don’t know anymore what criteria employers and clients use to judge their potentials. It’s been from experience to my volunteering and unfortunately a ‘background check’ of my online presence. Sometimes I wonder how an album of a trip to Cuba has anything to do with your performance and skill set, but let me tell you, every picture will be looked at.

Clever Code

I recently worked on a proof of concept mobile application for an insurance company. It was simply designed as a tool for sales to demonstrate how a potential concept could work.

The statement of work seemed to be reasonable, a week to improve some functionality and change some branding. It also included updating the dependencies of the project and upgrading it to work with latest tool set.

It really seemed like a reasonable project until I was given the source code. I realized that what I had in hand was production quality code with hundreds of libraries included. I could barely understand the workflow of how the code lead to functionality, it seemed like sorcery was being used to generate it. I've worked on a dozen of mobile applications and it was generally easy to understand how they worked.

Obviously, this 3 year old project wouldn't compile with the latest tool set. I thought it would be an easy task to simply bring up the libraries to their latest version, but a ton of compiler errors were thrown. Why? The code heavily relied on paradigms from the older libraries and the newer ones have changed workflows completely.

I realized that updating the application would require major refactoring which wouldn't fit within the tight deadline. I won't give too many details as work is supposed to be confidential, but it was a very simple app with a few screens and extremely basic functionality.

At that point, I decided that I would rewrite the application from scratch. What took a team several months to do I was confident that I could do it in one day. However, I wrote very simple and easy to understand code. It's a proof of concept, a prototype. The source code is supposed to be disposable once the company decides to turn the PoC into a production quality application.

In one day, I had the prototype working with the same functionality, actually more, than the original version. My goal was very different, it was a PoC, not production software, it's supposed to be a prototype. One day's worth of work is not costly to throw out, but spending on several employees to do the same thing, but with way more complicated code is way more costly and even more when it comes time to maintain it.

Even production applications can be overengineered. Code can be very clever but an impossible mess to actually understand. Most developers don't realize that code is easier to write than to read. In several years, a simple bug fix will break the application because you can't remember how the asynchronous event system worked when it could have been a simple method call in a seperate thread.

Code is supposed to be of the same scope of the application, not more. Annotations, lambda expressions and so on are tools to help you write more readable code but only when it stays reasonable. A super clever implementation of lambda expression that spans the entire screen is much worse than a simple for loop which is what you really needed.

New developers want to show how clever they are with complicated code, however it doesn't impress anyone because no one understands it. As I progressed throughout my career, I realized that very simple code is way more elegant than clever black magic. As a result, I ended up with more maintainable code that I could come back to years later when it needed a simple bug fix and I was confident that it wouldn't break anything else.

My belief is that code should be as simple as reading an English article. Only a one pass reading should give you an idea on what's going on. If you need to reread the code several times to understand it, it's a bad sign.

When you do need to be clever because it's the only choice, it better be documented with plentiful of comments, that explain why and not how the code was designed that way. Whatever is needed whether it's diagrams, a separate document or even a video. The point is that the next developer understands it right away.

If you can recite the code and it sounds like English sentences, you're on the right track.

Why I hate the weekends…

It's Monday, the dreadful countdown has started. You're already thinking about the end of the week, and it barely started. As the days go by, you are fixated on Friday 5pm. By Friday afternoon, your mind is so overfilled with the prospect of the two-day break that you can barely get anything done anymore. Some of your co-workers are not even at their desks anymore; they left early. When it's your turn to leave, you breathe a sigh of relief. It's the moment you've been waiting for. The start of the weekend.

However, what's so odd is that it's already Monday again. The weekend was a blur. Everything that didn't fit the workday was squeezed into the weekend. Groceries, laundry, chores, medical appointments and so on. By the time you've finished all that it's Sunday evening. Just like work, the weekend made you tired. You want to idle, but tomorrow's Monday and you've already begun thinking about work. You don't have time to do anything anymore because you need to sleep early to wake up for work on time.

Our lives are high maintenance. We need to maintain our relationships with our spouses, friends and family. We need to take care of ourselves with exercise, hygiene and so on. Our houses need to be kept clean and our fridge full of food. And to be able to do all that, we need work to make a wage so we can pay for what keeps us alive.

With only two-day weekends, we find ourselves squeezing all that maintenance in such a short span of time. We meet with our friends on Saturday. We do the groceries on Sunday. We do the Laundry on Saturday morning. Little time is left to do what we enjoy. For some, it's simply watching TV shows. For others, it's learning a new art.

The worst part is there is hardly any time for resting the mind and body. Our jobs can be mentally and physically demanding. Our relationships and our chores demand it too. It feels like being on an endless treadmill and there is no way to stop it. Many experience burnout or depression due to excessive stress and little break.

It's clear that the two days we yearn for so much every week are not enough.

Almost every month, there is a statuary holiday which extends the weekend by a single day. Oddly enough, after those weekends end, I find myself more at peace and rested. The first day of work after feels smoother and I'm not as stressed out.

Personally, I have tried to extend the weekend as much as possible. I do the laundry on weekdays, I shop for groceries on a weekday late at night. I try to meet my friends on weekdays. I do all that hoping that my weekend would be empty of such obligations and I would have it all to myself.

I want to spend time partaking in my hobbies on the weekend. However, I often find myself lifeless and staring blankly out the window. My mind is tired, my body is fatigued. By the time I'm fully rested it's Sunday night. At that point, it's time to head to bed and start the cycle of work again.

I feel like my whole life is centered around work. Even though I work a (what is considered) reasonable 40-hour work-week, I feel like too much of time is taken away from me. Not only is it actually being in the office but commuting too. My morning are devoted to getting ready for work: dressing up, packing up a lunch and so on. When I get back in the evening, I have to empty my mind of work and that can take a while. Only a few hours a day are left for me.

I'm a backend software developer and writing code requires plenty of creativity and thought. There's only so much I can muster before my mind quits. On top of that, I'm mentally ill and thoroughly medicated meaning I need even more rest. However, I hear co-workers who are healthier and more productive than complain about the same things I do. No matter how much fun I have at work, I still get tired. Everyone does and everyone needs rest after that. Even caffeine, energy drinks and modafinil can't fix that.

When I first started writing this, I thought that the problem was the weekends were too short. However, it is that weeks that are composed of 168 hours are not enough to account for 40 hours of dedicated work. Our body and minds cannot optimally function without adequate rest and breaks. We're not made for it. Our lives are demanding and work is demanding too much of our lives.

Even though modern society has allowed us to come really far when it comes work ethic, I don't think we are far enough yet. Our basic needs, our own desires, our dreams, our physiologies and psychologies need to be taken into account when we rethink what an ethical and humane work-week looks like.

We are no longer factory workers where our output is proportional to the company's sales figures. Machines and automation are taking over the remedial roles that we used to do. Today, we are artists and developers and managers and service providers. What we do might not make any money at all. Still, what we do demands of us quite a bit and to provide more, we need to do less.

I'm convinced that we need more time devoted to ourselves and those we care about. I want to spend more time caring for myself but I can't because I'm stuck in the system. To live, I need to pay my bills. I'm not lucky so I have to spend most of day working for it.

Someone has submitted this blog post to Hacker News. I encourage to continue the discussion there.