Ask HN: How working from home has affected you?

[stepsilva]

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]

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.