How has COVID-19 impacted your Tech job?

[Bridget]

Hi there, Tech workers! 

I hope this post finds you healthy, safe, and sane. It's impossible to understate the global reach and impact of COVID-19. It's touched every sector and industry there is.

I'm curious to know how it has impacted your day-to-day role and projects. How have Atlassian tools played a part in any changes to your job? 

I'm hoping here that we can share use cases and help each other out. 

Cheers,

Bridget

[Jimmy Seddon]

Great question @Bridget!  We are heavily entrenched in the Atlassian suite, we use both Jira Software and Service Desk (Cloud), we have a BitBucket Server, and a Bamboo Server.  We also didn't change anything in response to COVID-19.

Which I think proved the case that everything we were using already provided the visibility and accessibility that everyone needed to be able to successfully work from home.

Our company already had a couple of 100% remote workers and an open policy about working from home when you needed to be at home for some reason or needed focus space away from the office so in my opinion we were already part way there when we were forced to be at home.

The best thing I can offer to others around what helped us is product to product integrations (Which is why we chose Bamboo in the first place).  We also use slack, and we have setup many of our Atlassian products talking with each other as well as with Slack so that the right people are informed about things as soon as possible in the process.  This became even more valuable while isolated at home because you couldn't simply walk over to inform someone about something.

-Jimmy  

[Bridget]

Hi Jimmy! Great response. Happy to hear that your company didn't have to change *that* much, certainly a sign that your team is well set up for change. 

I am also happy to have follow your remote work series - your company is luck to have a thought leader like yourself as a resource! 

[Arthur Mack]

Our team has been using Atlassian for 8 years now so working form home was not really an issue. We did start to use MS TEAMS a lot more for Chat and meetings etc but we have it integrated with JIRA and Confluence so win win.

[Bridget]

Definitely a win/win, @Arthur Mack ! Love to hear you are using the technologies in concert with one another. Hope you had a nice weekend!

Bridget

[Darryl Lee]

It's awesome to know that Atlassian helps!

[Sutton, Andrew]

Good afternoon, 

I'm a bit late with this post, but I've just gotten to the party.  Covid has had a huge impact on my job.  When we began working from home last March I was doing tech support.  trying to support users who were new to remote work was especially challenging.

Recently I've changed roles, and now I'm a Microsoft 365 Adoption Specialist.  Trying to help user in our organization embrace the changes that Covid has forced upon them.

I've not used Jira before.  That's part of what I'm doing here.  I hope to find some sympathetic help for an old IT dog trying to learn new tricks.

Andrew

[David Wuth]

Pre-covid, our software company allowed individual contributors to work remote one or two days a week, but it was not encouraged and required manager approval, plus time to have "proved" the individual was responsible enough to work "unsupervised". When covid hit, our entire company went remote. As the Release Manager, I was already tracking our team velocity and saw that it remained at the same level even with everyone remote. Over a year later and our Associates for the most part love working remote. There are discussions about what the workforce may look like after covid - possibly with only one day in the office and the rest remote. It has opened a LOT of eyes in the manager and executive levels.

[Sutton, Andrew]

I think it says a lot for your organization that management eyes were opened.  I've got a friend who worked for a large company in Denver and working from home went so well for them that they were told there was no need to return to the office.  Very forward thinking in my mind but also it says a lot about the company and the employees that that level of maturity and trust exist.

My company is more on the "we need to get back in the office" end of the spectrum.

Here's something that I hadn't considered until I was at the audiologist yesterday being evaluated for hearing aids, in my home office, I have MUCH more control over ambient noise and don't struggle to hear conversations that occur over the cube tops.  As someone with hearing loss, working from home is a much nicer option for me. 

Besides that, the longer I'm in my current role the more I'm learning about Jira, and this Apple/Microsoft guy is a little surprised by how much I'm grooving on it.  The more I learn about it the more managable it makes my job.

[Darryl Lee]

My day to day so far hasn't changed much in terms of works.

The best thing is I can freely to work from home in any forms I am comfortable with.

But that brings a lot of cons such as:

1. Not able to meet up with my lovely colleagues.

2. No actually feeling of commute to work.

3. Not easy to set up a boundary between work and life.

4. Getting sloppy easily.

[Craig Nodwell]

I haven't been to the office since Friday March 13th, 2020.