The Cost of Working Remotely

I’ve been working remotely for five years now and it’s actually nice. I don’t spend money or time on a commute. I wake up and a few minutes later I’m already on my laptop working. When I’m done, it’s only a few steps to lie down on the bed. It feels like a privilege to still work from home when most companies have already pulled their people back to the office, either fully or hybrid.

But this time I want to talk about the cost of it, which is loneliness.

I’m an introvert. I don’t talk much, and when I hang out with friends I mostly just listen. Being alone isn’t something new to me. After a long stretch of it though, it started to “torment” me.

I miss being around a lot of people. On days when I work from home and don’t have many meetings, I’d settle for just hearing people chat in the background. It brings me peace. It keeps me from thinking too much, especially about the future and the worst that could happen.

Worrying about my career

I’ve been thinking a lot about what could go wrong in my career, and one big reason is AI. I’m not saying AI is bad. It helps me a lot in my day-to-day work. But it also brings some problems that keep bugging me.

First, I’m losing the joy I used to have at work. Before, I could focus on a single task for one, two, or even three weeks, fix bugs for the next couple of days, and then a new sprint would start. New sprint, new work. I liked that rhythm.

Now it feels different. I finish my tasks faster, and then I don’t really know what to do next. There’s no project manager anymore to assign me new tickets when my plate is empty, so I have to find tasks myself. When I can’t find one, it makes me really uncomfortable, and that often turns into frustration and losing motivation.

My team doesn’t have QA anymore either. Those guys were very reliable at catching edge cases I never would have thought of during development, and now I have to find them myself. AI can help with that, sure, but it’s not the same. There’s less human interaction in it.

Then there’s how fast everything moves. I see a lot of people showcasing how far they’ve pushed AI, building products on their own in no time, with at least hundreds of people using and paying for them. Every week there’s a new tool, a new model, a new this, a new that. It’s overwhelming, way more than how fast web frameworks used to change.

I’m not sure what to focus on, and my confidence takes a hit. I wonder if I can keep up because I don’t feel as advanced as everyone else. I’m still a simple man using the Claude Code CLI and its VS Code extension, with not that many skills or subagents.

And no, I’m not running a bunch of agents at once on different projects. I sometimes run a few, but not many, especially when I also need a dev server running. My laptop simply can’t handle more than that.

The last one is frontend itself. I’m mostly a frontend engineer, though I touch some backend too, so I somewhat consider myself fullstack. I feel like frontend is coming to an end. Not because it’s obsolete and people are leaving it, but because it keeps getting less valuable.

People with no frontend background can now generate frontend apps that perform well and work. The designers on my team, for example. As long as you can design or have a good reference, AI can help build the frontend part in minutes.

On top of that, I’d say frontend is relatively easy compared to backend, because it doesn’t involve complex system design, infra, or security. Well, it does, just not at the level I see in backend work.

As a frontend engineer, that worries me. If I can’t grow my knowledge outside of frontend, my value in tech keeps shrinking and it gets harder to find a job that pays more. It would really bother me if I couldn’t give more to my family.

Being around people helps

These thoughts take over my head, especially when I’m alone. It starts to feel like “torture” with everything spinning around in there. But somehow, when I meet people and chat with them, I calm down. I enjoy every interaction. I can even bring up the complicated stuff in my head and laugh about it with them. The problem feels lighter when I’m around people.

So these days, whenever there’s a plan to meet people, I can’t wait for the day to come. It could be a local tech community meetup, a day at the office on the last Friday of the month, or a day working from a cafe with my college friends.

On weekends I go to my mother’s house, and once a month I visit my in-laws in another town. I also see a psychologist. Yes, I have to admit I need professional help to stay sane.

I’m grateful I decided to stay close to my family after getting married. Even if it’s only on weekends, I can still see them. Coming back to my mother’s house always feels like home, and it’s nice to see with my own eyes that they’re doing alright.

Staying here also means I can still go to the office every month and once in a while meet the college friends whose group chat is still active since most of them still live nearby. So I don’t have to start from scratch. Building connections with new people is hard, and that’s the last thing I’d want to deal with when I really need human interaction.

Meeting people feels really good even as an introvert because I’m human after all, and humans are social. Even if I can work on complex projects alone with help from AI agents, I’d still rather be on a team.

On a team I can build real connections and ask for opinions from people who have real experience. I’m also not the only one who has to think through everything that could happen, and not the only one to blame when something breaks. That makes me feel better.

Lastly, I’d be okay with hybrid or work-from-office roles now. They raise the odds of me meeting like-minded people.