The One With a Lunch Date

Since we are now all stuck at home again, I think it’s important to try to get out and see people as much as possible (if you can do it in a safe way). After the “everyone has to work from home again at all times” announcement, I immediately made sure to ask my two usual lunch dates if we would still continue doing this although we can’t be in the office together anymore. They both said yes but they didn’t have time this week. So I asked a coworker who doesn’t live too far away if he would like to meet for a lunch walk sometime this week to get out of our homeoffice rut and we agreed to meet today.

Luckily the rain stopped before lunch time because I want to avoid public transport as much as possible with the current incidence rates, so I could take the bike. I chose a route that wasn’t the quickest but really nice, and listened to Pod Save America on my way to Ehrenfeld. We met at Kebapland but decided to go to a Kumpir place, take the Kumpir to go and go to the nearest park to sit on a bench. The Kumpir was good and we had a very, very good chat. It’s still so difficult to have a feeling of togetherness in a department that used to be in a big office space and is now completely remote. I have some people I see regularly in video calls but there are a lot of people I don’t hear or see anything from. Which is sad and in my opinion also not good for developing software that kind of needs to work together.

I just think that I personally have done and tried enough to change this. Some things have worked and are still working, some things have not had any success. Now it’s other people’s turn to figure out how we can do this better in the future. There is another lockdown(ish) winter coming and we will be a remote-first company anyways now. Someone needs to figure out how this works better than it does now.

But for me, this working week was good. Lots of good discussions during the two workshop days, lots of collaboration in our team, lots of calls with nice people from other teams and a very nice lunch date just before the weekend starts.