🏢 Return to Office

It’s merely semantics, but I’m not a fan of the term”Return to work.” I’ve been working for 18 months, not hanging out sipping fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. I think there is an idea that working remotely is some sort of extended vacation with people merely going through the motions.

Anyway, the plan is to try a return to office experiment. I’m not in favor of the idea as it doesn’t seem to gain anything. I’ve been working remotely for four month now and as far as I can tell, everything is fine. I’m testing tickets. I’m attending meetings. Code is being written. Releases are going out the door.

We’ve done at least two releases with a third in the works. If anything, we’re getting ahead of the curve. I’ve been remote for four months, the rest of the team has been remote since March 2020. The same 18+ months.

This seems like one of those, we want you back in the office so we can see your smiling faces, edicts. What problem does going back into the office solve? What deficiency does this take care of?

If I’m going to sit in an office in front of a computer with a pair of headphones connected to the same type of device I have in my house, why do I need to be in an office?

This seems to fall into the “return to normal” (let’s do things the way we did 5 years ago) philosophy, not because something is wrong.

Anyway, I will begrudgingly go along with it. I don’t agree with this “return to normal” mentality. Working remotely IS normal, and long overdue. Just like buying software in a box with a 400 page printed manual, or loading software from a floppy disk, the days of working in an office are antiquated. There are better ways to do things.