SDTimes Article by Jason English
Tough year. COVID and an uncertain economic outlook have made these very trying times for almost all people, including those lucky enough to be able to work from home as a part of the digital workforce that powers our business infrastructure.
Looking back, you could see signs of a great digital scattering coming for many software development-related businesses — not only the ones catering to restaurants and service sector jobs.
Speaking of travel and hospitality, the move of all our favorite perennial IT tradeshows online was the first canary in the coal mine. Engineers are stereotypically aloof, so you might think virtual events would be a fine replacement for in-person interaction. Yet, the knowledge sharing and relationship building that happened at shows — as well as the business that advanced there — will be hard to replicate.
Companies without the digital backbone to shift to remote development and operations quickly found themselves in hot water. If constant planning meetings and fire-fighting war rooms are the norm, what happens when all of that is replaced by a miniature Hollywood Squares matrix of heads and screen cams?
Companies accounted for this change, for a few weeks, with grace and understanding that not everyone’s home makes a good office. Bad connections, barking dogs, interrupting kids. Employees with WFH policies had a head start here, by making such arrangements ahead of time. Some companies even vacated office space in stride, never looking back.
But the remote scattering of workers takes a toll. Does innovation and quality start to suffer — even as many IT staff commonly report working more hours to meet increased demand, unburdened with commuting? Knowledge workers become more distracted, or frustrated, or unproductive working at home, leading to a reconsideration of how to either instill some sense of culture online, or safely return some work to the office.
Engineers in a product-oriented organization appreciate self-determination, so long as they are contributing valued work. Shared platforms for remotely governing agile software delivery from requirements, to repositories, to release trains and issue resolution are improving in quality and interoperability every day.
The very environments from which we deliver software keep scattering as well, as the old three-tiered application stack in the datacenter gives way to SaaS-based platforms, cloud infrastructure and microservices, calling APIs and running workloads in ephemeral containers and serverless architectures.
