At the place I work, rather than office computers, we all have laptops. This is partly because there is a policy of “hot-desking”, but also it can allow for us to work with clients at their offices. Since our business affairs are more or less wholly online, it means we can more flexible in where we work from. It can also allow for working from home.

This is a different setup to previous places I have worked, where one worked on technology based from the office, and any options for working from home were severely restricted, if they existed at all. Yes, you might be working with technology based halfway across the world, but your starting point would always be a computer fixed to the office.

The evolution away from this partly stems from the increasing move from standalone servers to cloud computing. Whereas in the past standalone servers would usually be based in closed networks that would only allow access from certain points, such as the office, with cloud computing the servers could be based anywhere, and with the sort of security infrastructure needed, can be accessed anywhere.

Furthermore, with the increased integration of deployment services, source control, and suchlike, with cloud computing, a great deal of the tasks previously associated with the development process are now online. With cloud computing, you can securely store the source repository, run unit tests, track bugs, deploy to either testing servers or production servers, and it can all happen without touching anything in the office. The only bit you need is a computer to develop on, and a reliable internet connection. And that doesn’t need to be in the office.

In a previous place of work, when I needed to work from home, I needed to log on to a virtual machine on my work’s network, and from that, log onto my office computer, and I had to call in advance to make sure that was turned on. The reason behind this convuluted way of doing things? Well, my developer tools were on my office computer, and the source code repository as well as my office computer was on the office network, and so I can could only access any of that by going through this virtual machine! As you can probably guess, the virtual machine virtially interacting with my office computer meant that the whole experience of using my office computer through 2 layers of abstraction was as slow as treacle.

Nowadays, when I work from home, I use my office laptop to develop, push or pull code changes from a remote repository, track bugs on a third party site, and so on. As I’m developing on the laptop, the development process is as fast as the machine I’m using, and I can update everything online when I’m finished, so that others in my team, who have the same setup as I do, can also do their work.

The last time I worked from home was when “The Beast From the East” was in full swing: basically from about Tuesday afternoon to Friday. And indeed, I’ve been working on adding “Working from Home” functionality to an HR application.

So you can probably see where this is going. “Working from Home” is becoming a bit of a buzzword now that Coronavirus infections are increasing, and working from an office looks increasingly risky. (Indeed, I notice that there was cases of infection in HSBC and Morgan Stanley offices in Canary Wharf in London, just a couple of blocks from where I was staying just a couple of weeks ago. So, obviously I’m a bit nervous about that.)

We’ve been told this week to taake our laptops home with us every night, just in case we have suddenly work from home. Some have alreaady been doing this, and are working from home now. Indeed, in our usual morning meeting, we got a taste of what the future might be, as a significant amount of people in the meeting appeared in video call.

Outside of the meeting, there was a feeling that this was not so much a matter of if but when. There have been discussion amongst us about what this would mean: although most of us had worked from home before, it was in short stretches- only 3 days a month was allowed for working from home- not possibly months on end.

One interesting observation was that it might lead to, if not an outright rejection, then at least a softening of the 9-5 hours. If you can do the job in time, does it really matter exactly what hours you work?

It does remind me of a previous workplace I worked where there was a degree of flexitime. As long as you worked within the “core hours” (Late morning to early afternoon), and you worked the agreed number of hours per week, then that was fine. Obviously working from home is going to be a challenge if you’ve not really done it before, especially if you have a family! But it does make me wonder- depending on how we would have to do this- if it could harbinger a great change to society and how it works.