An In-Office Day, Sound Familiar?
What does an in-office day feel like in 2019?
If you’ve been working mostly remotely for any length of time it feels like traveling back to a more primitive age. A time when your output as a developer was a secondary concern to acting the part in person.
The amount of unpleasantness you endure to even arrive at the place where you must be in order “to work” is significant. Environmental factors that are easily controlled in your home office are now completely out of your hands.
If you’re like me and try very hard to optimize your individual work approach, those pretty much go out the window during an in-office day. You’re on someone else’s schedule while in-office.
Before Sunrise
To me an in-office day means waking before sunrise. Though truly my in-office work day begins the night before in picking out work clothes. Then ensuring they are clean and wrinkle-free which often means time spent ironing or steaming them as well.
After getting ready I then face a 30+ minute commute in a metro area. Waking before sunrise is also a big trade off.
If I were to depart later in the morning, my 30+ minute commute would double. Also, any sort of inclement weather or accident along my heavily traveled expressway commute will cause my 30 minute best-case commute time to inflate rapidly.
Every trip into the office likewise increases gas and vehicle maintenance costs. In short, there are many disagreeable things to deal with on an in-office day before I even step foot in the door.
The Meetings
If you’re lucky you have time to grab a cup of coffee and a snack before the favorite in-office pastime begins, The Meetings!
Since we’re all in-office we should have a meeting for this and a meeting for that and meeting for those things. It’s a post for another day, but corporate world meetings are usually a big waste of time.
The synchronous nature of in-person meetings can be hugely detrimental to their effectiveness. If humans had high fidelity memories this would not be a problem.
Unfortunately, we do not. This means that many of a meeting’s discussion points will be interpreted differently or incorrectly by its participants’ memories.
It’s not easy to take notes on your laptop while other people are talking. It would be even more distracting if a room full of people were all typing away furiously during the meeting.
Instead we must rely on our memories or incomplete handwritten notes to recall what was discussed. This usually leads to something like this:
How many times have you sat in a meeting where the exact same problem is being discussed that had been covered at length on a previous occasion?
Far too often if you’ve been around the corporate world for any length of time.
The Good Part of In-Office Days
I don’t mean to suggest that in-office days are only bad. Talking with your colleagues about things outside of work organically is a wonderful thing. These kinds of conversations are just easier in person when we can naturally process non-verbal cues.
It really helps to forge more personal bonds and in general builds trust in relationships. It’s very nice to have these personal connections, and also helps us be more empathetic with our colleagues. Moreover, we can prevent animus that arises from treating each other in a transactional manner.
Cube Work
Trying to perform deep work in a cube farm is suboptimal to say the least. Whether it’s conducting complex analysis or writing code there are just too many distractions in the common office setting to be done well and with efficiency.
It’s a pernicious arrangement for us developers whose fundamental value proposition is to automate. And to automate well we need to attain deep levels of concentration to generate accurate mental models of the problem domain and technological topologies.
Among the distractions in your average cube arrangement are noisy neighbors, drop-ins, and environmental factors.
Sales Guy
If you’ve never had the pleasure of sitting next to a sales team, I highly recommend it for about a day. It will make you appreciate your home office more than just about anything.
I’ve had that pleasure and let me just say it was…loud. My favorite part was the sales guy in the adjacent cube who would conduct all his affairs on speaker phone, including ordering lunch from Jimmy Johns on a regular basis. Even the best noise-cancelling headphones can only do so much.
Drop-Ins
Then there are the drop-ins. You want to focus on a tricky bit of functionality and a colleague drops in and wants to talk about picking morels this weekend. If he’s a talker and not particularly self-aware, you’re going to be listening to morel talk for awhile until you can escape to the restroom.
Environmental Factors
In an office you are at the mercy of many factors in the environment. Maybe it’s the guy in the next cube who bathes in Axe Body Spray every morning.
Or the gal who listens to Spotify pop music on speakers at her desk. Or the animal lover in your all-morning meeting who is covered in cat hair when you are very allergic and asthmatic to pet dander.
The HVAC system is another point of consideration. Some office HVAC systems are incredibly loud and then shut off to deafening silence with regularity. If you happen to be right underneath a strong vent you might be freezing all day if the person in control of the HVAC likes it cool.
These are just a few things I’ve personally experienced during my time in-office over the years.
Home Again
After you’ve put in your time at the office, it’s time to travel back home again. For me this means an even longer commute than in the morning as the afternoon rush hour begins too early to beat it and still work a full day. My best case 30 minute commute turns into a 45-60 minutes if I’m lucky and there are no accidents or bad weather.
On average this means I have a 75-90 minute longer work day for travel alone. I suspect this is pretty normal for those of you that commute on a regular basis.
That’s a lot of extra time away from your families and friends. This is a massive quality of life detriment that persists largely due to inertia.
Summary
The in-office day is full of negatives for a developer. Aimless meetings, distracting environments, and stress-inducing commutes all conspire to degrade our productivity and quality of life.
However, meeting colleagues in person definitely has some benefits. It enables empathy and strengthens trust which can pay dividends in both a work and personal context.
On balance though, developers need to concentrate deeply in order to fulfill our value proposition. The way we do this is going be largely dependent on the individual. An in-office environment is a lowest common denominator paradigm of a bygone era.
The best companies are quickly realizing this and empowering their people to 10x their productivity by allowing them to optimize for their own best work style and place.