Can a software company be 100% WFH?

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The global pandemic has pushed us all to working from home (WFH). And overall across all industries WFH is proving to be a viable way of working. For the software world WFH was very common anyway, but now will complete WFH for months is showing to many that WFH works and this could be the new way of working with or without a global pandemic.

This has led many to ask:

Do we need to work at an office space at all?

We see a reflection of this thinking in big software companies already. Facebook and Shopify has already put out clear strategies for this change mindset about office space. A recent tweet from Tobi Lutke CEO of Shopify puts this succinctly:

Mark Zuckerberg did a longer version of the same thinking in Facebook post (of course)…

Our experience - WFH is great

At Kaz Software our experience has been extremely good with the 100% WFH mode. We posted recently about what we’ve learnt after two months of full WFH. Going by where we are we know that 100% WFH at all times is something that we can sustain very well. The time savings merely on the journey times on Dhaka’s infamous traffic itself justifies the WFH move.

But…

However, we also feel strongly about the need to be together as a team, working side by side. There is something in nature of work, nature of us being human that makes face to face interactions inherently better for some type of tasks. Here are some tasks we know we’ll have to revert to working together at the office.

Brainstorming software features

Brainstorming just doesn’t work the way it should in a virtual environment. There is something in the energy and enthusiasm in face to face discussion, something in the hand gestures of an excited colleague or heated argument about what is a good software and what is not, that is completely missing in the video calls. You just cannot do great brainstorming session without bring the team together.

Software UX/UI design phase

When you are designing UX as a team the constant to and fro between the designer and product manager or the developer is what drives the design forward. You take that out, move that into regulated video calls you will lose the creative spurts that happen in those face to face interactions. We would never want to take that out from our work, and this would be another phase of work we would always keep as a time to get together at the office.

Technical planning and architecture

Technical architecture and planning is something that can be done fairly well on the WFH mode. In fact some part of, it where a single architect is designing the overall blueprint, are best done alone and WFH works just fine for that. But when it comes to discussing the pros and cons of an architecture, debate out technology choices video conference calls fail miserably.

QA cycle

On intense QA and testing cycles of a project the constant need of the SQA team members to talk with developers, show them in action what is wrong, articulate their emotions of frustrations when a bug reappears or happiness when a bug has been fixed is something that can’t be done remotely. An intense QA cycle is very much like sports, where the developers are competing to create a bug free product or fix the bugs fast and the SQA team is working to find the bugs. The pace, the excitement, the mechanics of such a phase of the software development cycle just falls flat on remote teamwork.

So WFH is great. It’s here to stay. At Kaz we are prepared and committed to work from home as long as it takes. But we are also thinking of changing how we would work beyond the pandemic. WFH will be part our practice for sure, but we would also ensure that we work from office too. If you are in business of creating great software, as we are, there is no way but to meet and work side by side sometimes.

Stay safe!