LeeMobile

So the city transit strike is totally turning my life upside down.  With none of the buses running in the middle of winter, I have no option but to join the masses and drive into work.  Renata and I carpool into work while picking up a few co-workers along the way too.

The problem is that the increased traffic forces us to wake up at 5:30 to make it out on the roads early enough to avoid the gridlock.  We left one day 30 minutes later, and what normally would be a 50 minute commute turned into 2.5 hours of drudgery.

The bus drivers (and/or their union) are a bunch of knobs for striking.  I realize that their intent is to inconvenience the city as best possible to get their demands, but to do that in the middle of the winter is heartless.  Add on to the effect that they’re blocking privately chartered buses too, and picketing the streets… they’re not going to win any hearts.  As an essential service, they should not be allowed to strike at all.  From what I understand, they get paid quite well too.

What also is flipping my life upside down is that work refuses to let us telecommute during this period.  Which is strange because telecommuting does work when used effectively.

There have been vast and complex software systems written by teams that are geographically disparate.  The nature of software development is mostly solitary too.  At the same time, having a team of developers who are tired and frustrated from the commute will not help productivity.

Coding is not a repetitive activity like assembly line work.  The quantity and quality of work is not determined by how many hours you spend in front of the computer, or at your desk.  A fresh mind can produce great code in a few short hours, whereas a dulled and tired one will output garbage, with the risk of lost time spent debugging.  After sitting in traffic for hours on end, without proper sleep, you’re not in the optimal state for productivity.

I personally prefer to work in the office, but for the selfish reason that it fulfills my social needs.  I enjoy seeing and working with my colleagues.  But the real truth of it in terms of productivity, is that if I were to work from home I’d be much more productive.  It takes a lot of time and mental energy to understand and juggle the sections of code that you work on.  It may take sometimes hours of thought and reading to get a clear mental picture of the problem at hand, and once that stream of thought is interrupted, it may be hard to get back on track.  Obviously, the volume of distractions at work greatly exceeds anything you may have at home.  If we had our own private offices, it might be different (Joel Spolsky style)… but that’s not the case at work.

For those reasons, telecommuting makes total sense. It’s a win-win solution to a shitty situation.  The development team is more comfortable for not having to slog through hours of traffic, while at the same time product development is shorter and we have a higher chance of successfully hitting our target dates.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.