I’ve worked from home a few years now, and whilst the upsides are well known I’ve personally found some challenges there too. Have you experienced anything similar? How did you deal with it?
My tale:
When the UK went into lockdown (along with everyone else) in early 2020 I started working from home full-time. For the first year I was with the same team I’d worked with for years whilst in the office, so nothing really changed except my location.
I switched jobs mid-2021 and the new team was much smaller. I work as a software developer, and this team was a grand total of three people including myself. We didn’t have many meetings, only one a week, and except for being assigned new work I never interacted with anyone. It took a big toll on my mental health and I quit after three months.
I took an extended break from software development and started working on a plant nursery, driving tractors and tending plants - it was so much fun, but paid very little and ate into my savings a lot.
Went back to software development last year and thankfully manage things much better. I’m not a very social person, so it was surprising how important socialisation was to my mental wellbeing. I’m now part of quite a large team that speaks regularly, and when I next change jobs I know that this is something I need to look for.
I also have a garden now, so when the call of the wild hits me I go outside and sniff my tomato plants. I do miss driving tractors though.
I’m a working from home cyber security researcher. Wife and I found out we were expecting a kid a month before the lockdown started. That year was awesome - I got to spend all my free time with her and my home office was way comfier than work. I gained two hours of free time by not having to drive to work. Then after the kids was born we decided to move closer to grandparents. The only downside is that there’s no facility nearby to do classified work so I can’t do that. But those who do classified work can’t work from home either so it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
In a previous job of mine I had to sign a form confirming that nobody else had access to my work laptop and that I wouldn’t keep smart speakers in the same room I worked in. They couldn’t verify it of course, we just had to promise.
Given your field, when widespread homeworking became a thing was there any concern or resistance from management? I’d also be interested to hear whether you think the move to homeworking makes things more or less secure on the whole?
For unclassified work our technology use policy just dictates us to always use company’s VPN and to never use personal machines for work. The latter can’t really be verified automatically (only through audits) but our contract also says that if an audit points to private machine we agree to give it up for further inspection. So essentially the policy is enforced by fear of losing your home desktop. That’s about it. We do research so we can’t really even be restricted by what applications we install because we often times need to run someone else’s matlab model or something like that. Instead we are heavy into zero trust architecture. To access company’s code repositories I need to VPN in, open a browser and log into a special portal, only then I can ssh into the git server. As soon as my browser is closed - the git server isn’t even pingable from my machine, and I think the page has 4hr timeout. The only resistance from management I was aware of was about collaborating - “it’s a lot easier to bounce ideas off of each other in person”. Funny enough those managers were the ones to never use corporate chat.
On the classified side working from home is completely out of the question. You can’t take classified data home, period as it needs to be stored in only approved containers and those containers need to be checked every day by an approved person that’s not you.
Sounds like we work in similar fields. I changed jobs recently but at the one I had last year, I occasionally needed to do classified work. My boss told me I’d have to come into the office to do that, and I lived more than 50 miles away. So, I talked to someone who actually knew what he was talking about instead, and determined that I could, in fact, use a SCIF much closer to home. Just saying, if you get a chance to get a second opinion, it might not hurt to ask.