I've been meaning to write some new blog posts for a while, but the last 2 months have been pretty weird. I have a new job, and the whole pandemic thing.

My first day was the same day as my country went into lockdown, the 23rd March. The UK was very slow to actually respond to COVID-19, and just a week before that I was still assuming that I would have to go in to the office, even if just for one day to meet my manager and pick up a laptop. As it got closer to my start date I became more and more uncomfortable with this, as the only way I can get to the office is via the London underground, which in normal times is packed with people. Thankfully, the company had already transitioned to remote work by this point and were ready to send me all my equipment by courier. It seems super obvious in retrospect, but at the time it was hard to judge was an appropriate reaction, since the official advice was so wishy-washy.

This was the first time I've been hired as a technical lead (rather than taking on the role later on), and it was also the first time the company had hired into that role instead of promoting someone internally. I was also one of the first employees to be onboarded completely remotely. The first couple of weeks were especially hard because it was difficult to get to know my team and get up to speed on how things work. Having an onboarding checklist to work through helped a lot, as did spending a bit of time with the former tech lead who now leads another team. The devs on my team have a very collaborative working style which is great - we do a lot of pair programming remotely and when we run into problems we just jump on a slack call to talk through them.

There is a weekly checkin that we all fill out on 15five. I think every week they ask how we are finding "working from home". Obviously people are in very different situations right now, but this question really annoys me, because I actually love working from home, but I'm still clearly affected by the world around me. New business priorities mean there is a lot of pressure to meet deadlines, there is massive uncertainty over how long we'll be in this situation and what happens next, and I can't do the things I usually rely on to unwind. I'm definitely not ok right now and am not enjoying work.

I have a lot of doubts whether "technical lead" is the right role for me; it seems to vary a lot between teams and there is a weird mix of responsibilities. Although I thought I was joining a pretty small and product-focused team, I've spent a large part of my time this week playing the role of the expert in meetings with important people who want to report back to more important people about what my team is going to do to rush out already-promised features as quickly as possible. Ugh.

I think I've underestimated how tired and stressed I am, since it wasn't that hard for me to adapt to the lockdown itself. I'm a natural introvert, and unlike many people I have no shortage of things to do: I'm still working, I have a lot of hobbies, and I'm used to keeping in touch with friends through the internet since we don't live in the same city. Before I started the new job I got involved in a couple of open source projects, and I've had to scale that back so that I actually have time to myself again. However, I've been isolated for a long time now: I live alone, and even before the lockdown I took some time off between jobs that I spent mostly by myself. I also really miss being outside without stressing about avoiding other people (I don't have a garden and I live between a busy park and the high street).

Despite this, I have no real desire to go "back to normal". I don't miss working in an office at all, and I'm thinking about whether I want to work remotely full time permanently. In the past I was very reluctant to work from home more than a couple of days a week, but I think that was mainly influenced by the organisations I worked for not acomodating remote workers very well. Hopefully remote working will be taken a lot more seriously now?