I haven't written anything in awhile, in part because I spent last week in Denver for work. Then I was/am sick, so I've mostly been on my back watching TV. Oh, and some asshole scraped up my car in the MCO parking garage.
This is the second time that I've met work folks in real life. The first time was August of last year, and it was just my peer leaders in engineering and product. This time it was all of those folks plus the developers, so about 60 people. After almost three years, I finally shared a room with my team. That's hard to believe. Our new CEO would like us to gather at least twice a year, which I think is pretty great.
I love remote work, and I would prefer to avoid ever going back to a physical office several days a week. Commuting is such a time suck, and frankly a little dangerous when you consider other drivers. My productivity is undeniably higher when I work from home, because without the commute and better boundary setting, I work more. I'm much better at the latter than I used to be.
Still, I do enjoy human connection. Yes, it can be exhausting (because ASD), but it does feel good to make those connections. All of the Amazon nonsense about having to colocate to collaborate is, uh, nonsense, but it is true that it's harder to develop personal connections with people remotely. As it turns out, this is easy to solve by gathering a few times a year. No need to pack people into offices. This time, I had my team together for three meals outside of the larger group, which was really good for us. We all really like Indian food, we learned.
There were a lot of great side conversations about a great many things, especially late one night when we ended up in some bar. There was the expected complaining about usual things, an autism connection, parenting stories and even some talk about music. I watched a coworker do their best to speak Spanish to our Uber driver. I learned my boss is a hyper competitive go-kart driver.
It was a long week, but a good thing. Leaders are going back again in January, and we'll get face time with the execs, which will also be a first.
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