In today's episode we continue our discussion about what life will be like when the pandemic ends... whenever that will be. Will we go back to normal? How can we think about "normal" when so much has changed?
In today's episode we continue our discussion about what life will be like when the pandemic ends... whenever that will be. Will we go back to normal? How can we think about "normal" when so much has changed?
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Will we ever return to a life that looks like what it did before the pandemic? When will we get back to normal? Or when will we figure out what our new lives look like? And what will they look like? These are the questions that we all have about our lives and about our work. And we've been talking about these things on this series of Developer Tea. This series is called Post-Pandemic, Work and Life as an Engineer. And in today's episode, we're going to be talking about this idea of getting back to normal, whatever that is. So the question is an interesting question. And spoiler alert, we can't tell the future on this show. And anybody who claims that they know exactly how things are going to go in the future, you should probably stop listening to them. The truth is, we don't know. But we can make some pretty good guesses about some things that might change. Or at least we can think about some things that might change and the different ways they might change. So first, I want to talk about something that we've talked about on this show before. The asymmetry of information. Or in this case, the asymmetry of communication of information. So we're going to rewind back to somewhere around March 2020. Which is nearly a year ago. Kind of amazing. And around the middle of March, news publications started talking about something called the curve. Flattening the curve. And the basic idea was, we can't allow the virus to grow too quickly. To spread too quickly. Because given the same number of people, eventually getting the virus, getting the virus, getting the virus, getting the virus, getting the virus, getting the virus over a longer period of time, we will have enough resources to be able to help them. We'll have enough hospital beds, etc. But if it grows too fast, then the hospitals will fill up. And you can't pause the virus. It's going to run its course much faster if you're not able to get treatment if it gets really bad. As we said before, we're not really going to dive into the medical details of when you would need to get treatment. We're not really going to talk about the hospitalization versus when you wouldn't. But instead, I want to focus on this idea, the communication that happened. And there's been a couple of other ones since then. The widespread idea of flattening the curve. This is something that you probably know about if you're listening to this. And you probably also know that at some point, we all believed that we needed to sanitize all of the surfaces that we touched. And that we needed to sanitize all of the surfaces that we touched. And that we needed to sanitize all of the surfaces that we touched. And that we needed to leave our groceries in the garage for two or three days and then sanitize them when we bring them in as well. And that the opinion of many experts kind of changed on that. That the virus doesn't transmit as much through surfaces as it does through the air, through aerosol particles. And so our behaviors changed in response to that. And what became perhaps the most obvious and public communications, are two things, you can probably guess them, social distancing and masks. So these two ideas, they were communicated from a very high level all the way up to the world's leaders. Very specific ideas. Very specific measures that we can take during the pandemic. And so, because of this unified message about the pandemic and the types of behaviors that we carry, like flattening the curve and sanitizing, washing our hands, wearing masks, and social distancing, these are all things that we experience kind of at the same time. There was some synchrony to how we kind of got those messaging from our governments, from our social environments, from our cultures. All of those things kind of happened at the same time. And this was also promoted very heavily in various types of media. Including entertainment media. So it is not that surprising that we all knew about it and that there was relative behavioral changes that reflected these communications. And so we've been primed to imagine, and this is true outside of the pandemic, we've been primed to imagine that we all kind of move on the same cadence. That we all get the same kinds of information. That we all are part of the same community. That we all are part of the same community. That we all are part of the same community. That we all are privy to the same kind of data. And that that will continue. And this has been true in some ways about this pandemic. But it's going to change. It's going to change as we come out of the pandemic. And we're going to talk about why right after we talk about today's sponsor, LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly is today's leading feature management platform empowering your teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, you can deploy faster, reduce risk, and rest easy. If you are not using feature flags to release your features, you are missing out on so much flexibility. You're missing out on a lot of ways of testing those features to see how they work. How effective they are. See if you're actually being successful with those features. But you're also missing out on a huge amount of peace of mind. Whether you're an established enterprise like Intuit or a small business like Glowforge, there's thousands of companies of all sizes relying on LaunchDarkly to control their entire feature lifecycle and avoid anxiety-fueled sleepless nights. For example, at O'Reilly Media, releases used to be stressful, nerve-wracking experiences, but LaunchDarkly enabled the O'Reilly team to decouple their deployments from their releases. In fact, O'Reilly's VP of Engineering had this to say. He said, That's Chris Guidry. We can test features in production well in advance of a marketing launch, and if a feature causes problems on the day of launch, we can just turn it off with a kill switch. No rollbacks. LaunchDarkly makes our releases boring. And this is something that you want. You want boring releases. You don't want to be hanging on the edge waiting for your releases to fall apart and have to press that rollback button. If you want to make releases snooze-fests and start deploying more frequently and securely with less stress, head over to LaunchDarkly.com. That's LaunchDarkly.com. Thanks again to LaunchDarkly for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. We'll see you next time. We're out of the pandemic. And this is a much harder question because in the beginning of the pandemic, we all experienced things essentially at the same time. There was some time delay between, for example, high case numbers in New York City in the United States and then eventually those case numbers growing elsewhere. This is just because of the way that the virus transmitted and the way that the virus is transmitted. And so, for example, because of the high population densities and that kind of thing, there's some delay. But for the most part, the public messaging that we received was in sync. But that's not going to be the case as we come out of the pandemic. In fact, for some people who have either received the vaccine or they have already had COVID, they are already experiencing what many of us hope to experience in the future. And so, this is going to be staggered. And it's going to be staggered in a much different way because vaccines don't grow virally. In other words, we don't have an increasing number of vaccines on the same scale and rate because the virality model is an exponential model, but vaccines are clearly not. They're closer to a linear model in terms of how quickly they can be distributed. So, we're not going to have distribution to wide audiences very quickly. Instead, we're going to have a more linear distribution. Additionally, while everyone could theoretically catch COVID, they could be infected with COVID, not everyone is going to opt to actually take the vaccine. And not everyone will. We will have the vaccine when most of it has been distributed, when most of us have been vaccinated. And so, for this reason, we will still hear about active cases for quite a long time into the future. So, when do we declare that the pandemic is over? Well, there's a definitive answer to this because remember, a pandemic has somewhat of a formal definition or at least a formal declaration. This happened on March 11th of last year when the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 was indeed a pandemic, a global pandemic. But declaring the end of a pandemic is not the same as, say, declaring the end of war. In fact, the World Health Organization will likely eventually declare post-pandemic status. We don't say the end of pandemic. We say post-pandemic. This is all very similar. This is all very confusing to our brains. Our brains want simplicity. We want to be able to say, this thing is over. But this thing that we're talking about won't be over for a long time, perhaps ever. And the reason for that is because there's a lot of trailing effects. Even if we have infection numbers that go very low through the floor, there's likely to be new versions of this same virus that continue to be spread. It's extremely hard to contain a virus like this that has had a spread like this. So it is unlikely that any of us will forget that we ever heard of coronavirus. It's unlikely that it will go into our rearview mirror without a trace. So if we're looking for a grand finale or a moment in time that we can celebrate, it's possible that some governments or governmental agencies might hold some kind of press events or something similar to this where we can kind of mark that we kind of have effectively ousted the high transmission numbers. That's about as much as we can hope for. But because of this staggered experience and because, for example, each state is approaching vaccinations very differently, each country is approaching vaccines, very differently, we have such an asymmetrical experience. We have such differing experiences with coming out of this that it's unlikely that we'll ever experience something like what we did in the beginning, which was very unified messaging about the pandemic itself. So what can we expect when we do kind of move forward as a culture, as a society, what can we expect that to look like? We're going to talk about that a little bit on today's episode and the next episode of the show since there's so much to talk about in terms of our expectations. The first thing that we should note, once again, we said at the beginning of the episode, we'll say it again now, is that anything we say here is just a guess. Nobody can predict the future, but we can look at trends. And many experts say that COVID has not necessarily created much, new behavior in us other than maybe some avoidance behaviors, but it is accelerating existing trends. It's kind of amplifying those trends to a much faster or much more severe degree. So what are some of those trends? Certainly going remote. Going remote was a trend before COVID occurred. And part of this is in response to the fact that our tooling allows for it. Our tooling, especially as software engineers, allows us to work remotely fairly effectively. Most of our work is very tightly controlled in terms of what is the output of the work. The output of the work for most software engineers is code and documents surrounding code. So much of our collaboration happens in that document-oriented fashion. And working remotely has become a financially advantageous, in many ways, option for companies to pursue. So remote working was already a trend. Coronavirus obviously accelerated that trend, but it did a lot of other things for remote work. For one, people who had never experienced it before and who didn't really have a foreseeable future where they wanted to experience it, they were kind of forced to experience it. Many times when we're talking about coronavirus in the future, especially on this podcast, we're going to talk about some of the forcing functions that were provided to us as a result of the pandemic. And this is one of them. The people who we would never expect to try remote work were forced into trying remote work. In some cases, what this has provided is obviously a new perspective on remote work. But in almost all cases, at the very least, we have this new set of tools and a new understanding for how the person who is remote is feeling in a given workday. We understand the idea that remote meetings can be very difficult on the person who is listening from their computer. By having the experiences ourselves, we can develop, naturally, empathy for those who are remote. And this is important because it means that future remote positions, especially in companies that only have some remote, in other words, they're not fully distributed, they have only some positions that are considered remote positions, those people now have a new lens on how to elevate the experience for the employees who are remote. And this could be, perhaps, one of the most important things about this forcing function that we're talking about here. One of the most valuable things for remote engineers, for remote software developers, is for other people to understand and respect the difference between in-office and remote work. They're not the same, and we shouldn't treat them the same. And this pandemic has forced us to feel that. Not just to reckon with it from a logical perspective, but to actually have the emotions of sitting behind your screen all day, rather than sitting in a cubicle. Another very important effect that this hyper-acceleration of experiencing remote work could have is something I'll call a permissive effect on remote work. Where previously, remote meetings, remote communications, was viewed as a second-rate substitute. And it was viewed as a bad alternative to in-person. It was viewed as second-rate or the unfortunate side effect of having a travel schedule that wouldn't allow you to be in the office. Now, many companies have moved to a remote default position. In other words, not only is remote no longer considered a second-class citizen for meetings, it's the most likely option that people are choosing. Right now, that's true. That will change to some degree as large companies say, okay, today is our moving back day. Everybody can come back to the office now. And people may have this rebound effect where they want to meet in person for a little while. But what will likely not change from a cultural level is now that we've opened up a new door, we've opened up a new door. We've opened up a new door. We've opened up a new door. We've opened the door to remote meetings or remote collaboration being a viable tool. It's very likely that the people who otherwise would have felt, and here's the permissive part, the people who otherwise would have felt some level of self-consciousness about suggesting a remote interaction will now feel full permission and perhaps even a duty to make that an option. Remember, as we said before, the kind of outro coming out of the pandemic is going to be staggered. We're going to have a different experience for each of us. And so by showing other people respect, that will require that we accommodate remote first thinking. It will require that we accommodate for people who have not yet had the vaccine, right? So we're going to start building these muscles for, hey, you know what? Some of us are comfortable. Some of us are vaccinated. Some of us are in the office. And so we could hold this meeting in person, but not all of us are here. Let's provide the remote option. This is very likely to happen because we've already started building those muscles. We've already tried these pathways. We've already seen that people are capable, for the most part, people are capable of using this, this route of work successfully. And so in order to show respect for the people who are not able to meet in person yet, we will still provide that remote option for everyone for quite a while, most likely. The normalization of this remote process or the option of remote processes will likely trigger us to start questioning our assumptions about what is the best way to get out of this situation. And so we're going to have to start to think about what is necessary. And this is a move towards some kind of efficiency mindset when it comes to our meetings. Do we really need to do this meeting or do we really need to do this meeting in person? This could lead, it may or may not, lead to us questioning whether we need an office at all. Do we really need an office if all of our meetings have the option of being remote? I don't know that we're going to do away with this. I don't know that we're going to do away with offices this year or even in five years from now because there is still a human element to interactions in person. And we have felt that. And so the interactions that we do have in the future are likely to mean more to us. When we choose to spend time and you can probably survey your own life experience over the past couple of months or over the past year, the people that you've chosen to spend time with in person, whether you chose to, let's say, quarantine in order to see them, those people are likely very important to you. You're not spending time around people that you don't know, most likely. Those interactions have likely been very important, very valuable, worth spending the time and the effort to make happen. And so as people return to an office environment, some people will most likely return to an office environment, they are likely to, at least initially, see the office environment as more of a socially interactive place than they did before. It's more of a social opportunity than it is a productive opportunity. We're going to talk more about what the future could look like post-pandemic, on the next episode of Developer Tea. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you don't want to miss out on that one, the future one, then go ahead and subscribe in whatever podcasting app you're currently using. Thank you again to today's sponsor, LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly is today's leading feature management platform, empowering your teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, you can deploy faster, reduce risk, and rest easy. Head over to launchdarkly.com, to check it out. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I would love for you to join the Developer Tea Discord. I will give you an invite directly if you send me an email at developertea.gmail.com. You can also reach out to me on Twitter at at developertea. If people in there who are talking about their careers, asking questions, I'm in there. I answer and ask questions. I ask for feedback in there. We have episodes. Every episode that comes out, it is automatically added to that Discord. We're going to hopefully continue to expand what we're doing with the Discord into the future. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.