Do You Work From Home?

With all this COVID-19 stuff changing our lives, I was wondering how many of us now work from home and how it's affected you.

Bonus points for shots of your home work setup or description.

Working from home now, optional since office is still open.  Doing most stuff via a remote connection to my work computer, which for graphic-intensive programs like CAD and GIS is slow AF.

riding the bentley through the battlefield to get some tp and stuff

  On 3/24/2020 at 7:46 PM, BobDobalina said:

Working from home now, optional since office is still open.  Doing most stuff via a remote connection to my work computer, which for graphic-intensive programs like CAD and GIS is slow AF.

No VPN option?

Read an article in the newspaper about old devisions between blue collar and white collar people being painfully visible again. Because the white collars all seem to be able to work from home. And the blue collars either still need to go to work, or are in risk of losing their job.

So getting back on topic, I guess I have a white collar. I can work from home. Which means lots of Zoom or Microsoft Team and the likes. Zoom appears to be the winner. Or rather, it's like watching youtube react videos, but through Zoom and with familiar people.

It's a bit of getting used to. But in the end, it's not really that big of a change, I feel. Life goes on. And so does work. Boring, right?

  On 3/24/2020 at 7:47 PM, Joyrex said:

No VPN option?

I should've been clearerer, it is thru VPN and TBQH it is relatively fast; only having a single monitor (as opposed to 2 in the orifice) is probably the bottleneck.  That and being so easily distracted!

Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak I was able to work from home twice a week. Now it's every day. My county just put a non-essential travel lockdown as of midnight tonight and that includes my office. So as of tomorrow I have no choice but to work from home.

Having to conduct big Skype meetings over VPN isn't super fun.

  On 3/24/2020 at 8:37 PM, BobDobalina said:

I should've been clearerer, it is thru VPN and TBQH it is relatively fast; only having a single monitor (as opposed to 2 in the orifice) is probably the bottleneck.  That and being so easily distracted!

I have one monitor... 4K 55" TV

Having a dedicated space to work is super important - I am using the guest room and I can shut myself away

Got online classes for uni. It's fucking shit but it's all we can do.

before all this i worked from home every friday and some mondays. i already have an office (spare room with most of my stuff) so no real adjusts needed. 

I already worked from home to some degree, as long as there were no meetings scheduled on a given day I could stay out of the office. Having said that I find an office useful for actually focusing and getting work done. All I am doing at the moment is videoconferencing, it's a waste of everyone's time and everyone knows it but the world has stopped so people feel they need to justify their existences somehow. My wife is working from home too, she has a real job and does actual work so she's using the home office while I play PS4 and watch cartoons.

i've just been passing time at home since february, doing the occasional shifts at the hospital where i've worked for a few years while i wait for my new (graduate, woo) job. if anything i've worked less since the outbreak, but that's mostly due to me wanting to kick back and relax before i jump onto the 40h/w treadmill life, rather than the virus. i can honestly say the quarantine hasn't meant much of a difference to how i've lived the past few months.

  On 3/24/2020 at 8:24 PM, goDel said:

Read an article in the newspaper about old devisions between blue collar and white collar people being painfully visible again. Because the white collars all seem to be able to work from home. And the blue collars either still need to go to work, or are in risk of losing their job.

So getting back on topic, I guess I have a white collar. I can work from home. Which means lots of Zoom or Microsoft Team and the likes. Zoom appears to be the winner. Or rather, it's like watching youtube react videos, but through Zoom and with familiar people.

It's a bit of getting used to. But in the end, it's not really that big of a change, I feel. Life goes on. And so does work. Boring, right?

Expand  

thought about this post and how it relates to the responses in this thread. i mean, surely there's a selection bias as to which members respond to this topic, but it seems the few who have are quite unaffected. braindancers = mainly white collars? wouldn't surprise me. no offense intended in any direction, of course. i do know there are some blue collar workers here though

  On 3/24/2020 at 8:24 PM, goDel said:

Read an article in the newspaper about old divisions between blue collar and white collar people being painfully visible again. Because the white collars all seem to be able to work from home. And the blue collars either still need to go to work, or are in risk of losing their job.

I work for a land surveying firm and thankfully our field crews are squared away with work for the near future along with the office. They don't interact with anyone beyond their co-worker in the truck and most of their work is outside in the open and often out of town. 

The office personnel, myself included, have always had the option to work with laptops from home for OT, to make-up hours, etc. Helped me out too in the past when our kids were sick and couldn't go to daycare. It made the transition a lot easier. We also all got more monitors and docking stations to replicate our multi-screen setups at home last week. Did a Microsoft Team project meeting but it's a weekly thing. Everything else is via email or on an as-needed basis and we're left alone to work our 40 hrs when we can.

I work from home so no difference here. Fewer emails but that's what you can expect.

No. And when I do, I hate it.  I cannot concentrate properly.  Merging work and home feels like an evil to me.

Been working from home for 6 years now. I could never go back to an office.

Why I like working from home:

• I get my own interruption free space that I'm constantly improving
• I'm not wasting all my time and money traveling
• My dog loves having me around all the time
• I can meal prep/eat healthy, workout whenever I want
• I can blast the Collapse EP 20x per day
• Schedule is generally flexible, I work from like 7-3ish every day, somedays more some less, get coffee, take a shower, go on a walk when i feel like it
• My boss trusts I can get work done without hoovering over me
• I generally get paid a salary based on my skill vs location

Been working from home for the past 2 years. Love it. I get to expense 100% of my home internet and also mileage when I go out on site visits. My company pays 58 cents/mile, so it encourages me to get out, since I can actually make money on that. Plus not having to commute saves wear & tear on the car (and your sanity!) Free company iphone, dual monitor set up, laptop, wifi hotspot...so yeah, shit's awesome. Like @Joyrex said, important to have a dedicated space to work from if you're doing this long term. I couldn't do this sitting at the kitchen table all day. I have a bedroom converted to a study that I work out of. I don't know if I could ever go back to working from an office now. So much of your day is wasted commuting, and even getting into the office and getting into "work mode" takes a lot of time.

Wish I could work from home. But idk what niche I'd fall into with my skill set, given my job is almost entirely physical work.

  On 3/25/2020 at 1:10 AM, Enthusiast said:

I already worked from home to some degree, as long as there were no meetings scheduled on a given day I could stay out of the office. Having said that I find an office useful for actually focusing and getting work done. All I am doing at the moment is videoconferencing, it's a waste of everyone's time and everyone knows it but the world has stopped so people feel they need to justify their existences somehow. My wife is working from home too, she has a real job and does actual work so she's using the home office while I play PS4 and watch cartoons.

This is exactly me. Moved the PS4 out of my office/mancave so she can use the desk while I play 8hrs of battlefield 1 a day in my pants in the lounge. I had a bath at 11am today, fuck it. All rules out the window.

I teach.

It was fun for the first week, for both me and the students. Never seen 'em work so hard in my life.

Now the novelty's worn off. They're not as involved anymore and I'm growing sick of having to stare at a screen the entire work day. The reason I started teaching was to move away from that.

  On 3/26/2020 at 9:50 PM, rhmilo said:

I teach.

It was fun for the first week, for both me and the students. Never seen 'em work so hard in my life.

Now the novelty's worn off. They're not as involved anymore and I'm growing sick of having to stare at a screen the entire work day. The reason I started teaching was to move away from that.

 

what grade/class? assume you're talking about the virtual learning novelty wearing off. my kid was so excited on monday to get school work he could do at home on the computer. by today I couldn't get him interested in doing any of it. he's only 6 though so his "assignments" aren't really that serious. but still, no idea how this is going to go for the next several weeks while he's trapped at home.

  On 3/26/2020 at 11:00 PM, zero said:

what grade/class? assume you're talking about the virtual learning novelty wearing off. my kid was so excited on monday to get school work he could do at home on the computer. by today I couldn't get him interested in doing any of it. he's only 6 though so his "assignments" aren't really that serious. but still, no idea how this is going to go for the next several weeks while he's trapped at home.

Tertiary education, at a “university of applied science”.

A lot of the mechanisms for getting students to acquire knowledge are the same for eighteen - twenty year olds as they are for first graders. As your story illustrates.

The difference being that it’s probably easier to reason with my students about the necessity of working this way than it is with your kid. Good luck!

Teaching IDM at MIT