This is Work

A glimpse of human work in the post-pandemic era

Morning, wake up, wash my face, eat breakfast, put on my hoodie, take on the coat, carry my computer bag, and say goodbye to my family. Go out of my bedroom, walk through the corridor, open the sliding door, enter the study room, take off the coat, sit at the desk, take out my MacBook Pro, put on the headphones, and start working.

You read that right. I have worked like this since the lockdown of the Covid-19. Compare to the 1.5-hour commute before the pandemic, it now only takes 15 seconds — from the bedroom to the study room.

I am a software engineer. Before the lockdown, I was working for an IT Service Company. Every day I took at least 1.5 hours from my home in the suburbs to the office. However, most of my daily work is done by sitting at my cubicle — coding. Excluding occasional meetings and checking servers in the machine room.

Later, the pandemic began, and we changed to remote working. We use GitHub, the largest and most advanced development platform, to build, ship, and maintain our software. Daily communication between colleagues is done with Slack, a proprietary business communication platform. Using Jira, a software development tool used by agile teams, to manage all software projects and team members. And we use Zoom to hold all of our meetings. In the end, we simply moved most of our services to the Cloud Service like AWS, our machine room disappeared. AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms.

Late last year, I moved to another city. I also resigned from the previous company and become a freelancer. Still love programming, I develop my own apps and research my optimistic fields, such as AI, IoT, and blockchain technology. I will look for work through LinkedIn, Upwork, Fiverr, etc. As a freelancer, I have more time to build myself, so I write articles on Medium to share my knowledge, post interesting videos on TikTok, and update my YouTube channel. My study room, Starbucks, Airbnb, and shared workspaces like WeWork have all become my office.