Lately I’ve been thinking more and more in going back working remote as a developer / devops engineer.

Since I became a dad, I started to feel in office work much more stressful for personal life, which now involves a larger family. I started to feel that time spent with my children is the most critical, and without the flexibility to have more time for them, office work became something that feels painful, then giving any sense of good achievements.

I do work for a company that offers great things for all the employes, but still, more I analyze things, makes me realize how much I personaly loose for having to work a 9am to 5pm adding time spent commuting. That is a total of 11 hours. The more you think of it, the more I realize that is not acceptable.

That’s why I’m really looking forward in switching back either to work fully remote or either be open for an opportunity that would be really close to where as a family we decided it’s in our best to live.

Living in a place for the job, in most cases is not offering your family, especially your children the best for them. Not choosing for them to be in a good school, to be surounded by a great community, but choosing it for work, you ar harming them.

So this gets me to the point of thinking that companies that offer developers/system engineers positions and forcing only in office are not intended to allow a work / personal life good balance. It is understandable that the company should be looking for their workflow in the end to make profit, but if profit is possible also by allowing people to work remote, then why not?

Whenever a company is enforcing people in office while the position could be equally served remotely, you should be aware that the company has too many micromanagement obsesed people. And that might cause you even more problems on long term.

Another reason why remote might be better: less polution. Really. Now, think about it. We commute. Let’s be honest. And most of us use cars, and we drive alone. We are a percentage of all people that are on the motorways commuting towards the cities. We polute, and we polute a lot. One way would be if goverments would be allowing/offering something for companies that put first remote work, this could help in reducing polution caused by us communiting.

But the most important think is families. We should be a society that improves quality of life. Working in an office on job roles that can be done remote is just a blocker for evolution of a better society.

We need to progress towards being able to dedicate more time for ourselves and our families and to supports all that are heading towards having a family.