When Life Gives You Lemons or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Working from Home
Published: 2020-05-11 21:44:07

The rumors had been circulating. We knew it was only a matter of time before our little bubble of software engineering love at the Denver campus of the Flatiron School would batten down its hatches to weather the pandemic. However, it wasn't until our afternoon Friday meeting that it really started to hit me. This is probably going to be the last time that my cohort mates and I will get to see each other in person. 

I headed into the weekend feeling nervous about what the future held. Would I still be able to keep up with what was already a demanding and stressful curriculum? Would my school even be able to rise to the challenge of transitioning their program to being entirely remote on the fly, and would the quality of the education still be the same? Lastly, I was worried that my cohort mates and I would lose touch with one another, and that the community that makes Flatiron School such a wonderful place to learn would suffer. 

The following Monday, we all heading into our first morning meeting via Zoom. It was a little awkward at first, none of the students were really speaking out loud and getting people to engage was a bit like pulling teeth. However, our schedule still came out via Slack and we still had a full day of courses planned. The majority of our lessons are recorded and posted on a site for us to revisit, so these new remote lessons already felt somewhat familiar. Again, it was a little awkward at first but after a few days the teachers and students were joking around and contributing like normal. 

I initially thought that I would have a tougher time adapting to working from home. However, as long as you go into each day with the mindset that you are going to be productive, you can still achieve the same level of output. Some days I even feel that I am more productive working from home. Not having to commute 30 minutes each way to campus frees up that much more time for me to work. I have also found that having a space in your home, no matter how small, dedicated solely to work, allows you to make the mental switch between home and work much easier.  

The in person social aspect is the only part that is difficult to replicate digitally. While on campus I would bump into my instructors in the hall all the time. We would talk for a few minutes about a topic that I was struggling with, or about how the day was going. Similarly, it's so easy to just tap the person sitting next to you on the shoulder and ask them for help on a problem, or just to see what they are working on. I still stay in contact with my peers and instructors remotely, but now I have to make a conscious effort to do so, whereas before it would just happen organically. 

For the most part though the transition to learning and working remotely has been smooth and painless. Being a good developer is all about solving problems, quick learning, and being comfortable with the knowledge that you can't know everything. I call it the "yet" mindset. I don't know that technology "yet", I haven't figured out how to fix that bug "yet," and we haven't figured out how to work and run a remote school "yet", but give us a weekend and we'll see what we can come up with.