HACKER Q&A
📣 stepsilva

How working from home has affected you?


How are people working on product development coping with the work from home situation? What kind of challenges or obstacles are you currently facing when working remotely? I am trying to understand the current product development landscape and I would love to hear from people working in digital product management, developers or designers.


  👤 poletopole Accepted Answer ✓
I'm a dev and have worked 7+ years remotely. What I've found that helps is to do voice conferences where the dev team has casual discussions on anything they want to share, maybe twice a month. It's very hard to gauge someone's personality or insecurities over chat alone. I worked on location with my boss for a year before going remote and that helped considerably because I knew how to communicate with him--that's what it boils down to--is knowing how to approach a team member to help them or ask for help, give them assignments, collaborate, etc. Having these "huddles" is also a good way to share what you're having trouble on and get advice.

👤 MogwaiAllOnYou
Fortunately (for me) I'm back working in the office, albeit on my own most of the time.

The main thing I hated about working from, apart from not having the space to have a proper desk setup, was just feeling constant anxiety about not feeling productive or maybe more so not being seen to be working. And I don't really know why I experienced this, because we don't have that sort of culture at all. However this lead to poor sleep and stress.

I know a lot of people much prefer working from home, and most of if not all of my coworkers do, but I do feel like a lot of the conversations around WFH, especially from software engineers, is WFH is brilliant with no downsides, and the conversation completely negates the people that dislike it for whatever reason


👤 probinso
All of my out of work relaxation activities have stopped. I was already remote, but that is not the same as isolated. I used to use a co-working space. Home desk used to be for arts and crafts and hobbies. now my home desk is for work and I have no social interaction. It makes me bad at conversing and it makes me very anxious. I have settled on being increasingly bad at interacting with people

👤 giantg2
I'm a developer and I switched teams/stacks about a month or two before we started WFH. I noticed that I'm learning much more slowly than when I was in the office.

👤 davidajackson
Pet keeps attacking the blinds during Zoom meetings. Not sure what to do about it.