COVID-19 [FULLSTOP]. Most of the things even in your mind stop at this when you hear or read this word. No one faced a pandemic in about a century or simply we didn’t grow up to live a quarantine life. Covid-19 affected us all in one way or the other. Some are adapting to WFH (Work From Home), some lost their jobs or some ran out of all of their savings while others are trying to cope with daily challenges. A lot of questions on HOW the world will resume. still unanswered.

Living in quarantine works for a lot of people but also not works for a lot of people. Some people are happy with its pros while some are complaining about the cons. In between this all, a usual quarantine day in a software engineer’s life is almost always planned i.e. Checking on JIRA for any issues, going through confluence, scrum meetings, design-related meetings, converting business logic into code, testing your code as units, modules and also doing regression, saving their apps from the eyes of QA, providing estimates and then meeting those estimates as deadlines (depends on your client 😉), and don’t forget that great BUILD time that your IDE takes for every single run.

Working from HOME, WFH, the new style of doing your job all over the world.

People often think of software engineers as shown in movies where a guy with glasses is sitting next to 3 to 4 screens and typing like he knows everything OR that we can hack any system with just a snap. No, it’s not like that. Being a software engineer comes with a lot of responsibilities. Your single line of code is to be used by millions of users out there. Scrum meetings with Project Managers and people across the board are a part of our job. Meeting with design teams, system architects, and business personnel, all of these and a lot more are affected by COVID-19. Although we can still use video conferencing tools to overcome that overall productivity is being compromised.

Due to Covid-19 a lot of time is being consumed in these online meetings and what makes it more difficult is when someone’s connection got interrupted or you can’t hear them properly because of the noise in their voice. Imagine all this happening when you are discussing a major update 😟. Now you have to struggle with “Please say that again, you broke up” or “Sorry I was unable to hear you properly”. (But this is also a blessing when you are not in the mood of listening to others or going on with the routine! 😉.) Things get much worse when someone, in the end, repeats the conclusion of the video and that is completely different from what you have filled your notes with. Believe me, you don’t want this to happen to you. Also, don’t forget the moment when someone in your house is sneaking through the door on your back while you are addressing the people how you wrote the great line of code.

That’s not all, WFH comes with the opportunity to work from the comfort of your living room, home desk, and also dining. With all these and a lot of other advantages, some people also forget about taking those important short breaks during work hours, to stretch their body, move a little bit to chat with someone, or do anything other than sitting next to the screen. That is what I miss most about my office (NON-QUARANTINE) days having that discussion, fun, and those special COD sessions 😍 during work as it keeps us active. When you are a software engineer, you need to stay active.

Being human it's in our control to take advantage of any situation and grow to be the better version of ourselves or just remain in our comfort and complain about things. We all should (including myself because I am an indolent too) achieve a goal or at least make progress towards it. Talking about your goals are not always about studies or career, it’s about improving yourself for your good and the people nearby.

Originally published on Medium: Link Here