Toby Atkin-Wright

A bank holiday is a day to get things done at work. My English colleagues have their bank holidays off, but in Scotland we work through and have floating holidays instead.

While most of my immediate colleagues are also in Scotland, somehow the English bank holidays feel like some of my most productive working days. There are fewer interruptions, fewer meetings, and just a few fewer Slack messages.

I’m used to a pretty steady stream of LinkedIn contact requests from recruiters and the like, but I think this is the first I’ve had from a football coach.

Fifteen years ago I started working for Scotland Online, as the business was called back then. I started contracting through an agency in March ’06, and then when we realised I’d be there for a longer run, directly contracting from September the same year. And when it was obvious that I’d be about for a longer longer run, I became an employee in September 2010. All seems like another world.

When I started I think I was one of two software developers working for a company that was mostly focused on systems and infrastructure work. I spent the first couple of years writing PHP and MySQL, a skill set that meant I was well placed to develop the internal tools for handling the 1911 census project when we won that. And I’ve been doing the same sort of thing ever since, with technologies changing as the years have passed.

The company name changed to Brightsolid Online Publishing, then DC Thomson Family History, then Findmypast, but it is still the people I work with, and the history we work on, that continue to make work a pleasure.

At work our holiday year starts at the beginning of April, so there is always a rush to take one’s remaining hols before the end of March. I always keep a couple of days of holiday to hand in case I need to use them at short notice, so end up taking them around this time. Hence being on holiday yesterday and today. But I’m back to work tomorrow.

This past year many colleagues didn’t take as much holiday as usual, for obvious reasons, so have been taking weeks of holiday in the past couple of months. Makes sense, but has left work feeling quite sparsely populated at times.

On our work Slack I suggested that we could solve this in the future by giving everyone their own holiday year, cycling on their birthday. That would spread the pinch points throughout the year. It may not be common to do this, but other organisations take similar approaches. But it obviously wasn’t popular with my lot, as the idea was shot down, with an unexpected level of negativity. I suppose people get quite attached to the structure of their working life, and any suggestions for change feel like a threat. Or just a lot of hassle.

I’ve been mostly working from home for over a decade, with my contract specifying that I only need to be in the office one day per week. That one day was typically in the local Dundee office, and then I’d spend maybe a week each quarter working in the London office.

For a year now I’ve been working from home 100% of the time, and it has been a fantastic working year. I feel more productive and happier with my team working from home than I ever did with colleagues in the office.

Zoom calls, particularly for pairing, have been a great success. I find it far easier to work on technical tasks with a colleague on a call, than it is to sit next to them. With my eyesight, when sitting next to someone I struggle to read text on their screen.

Meetings are far more personal and egalitarian if everyone is on their individual connection. I don’t want to go back to the grim days of connecting in to a meeting room, where as a remote participant I can’t easily hear what people are saying, or for that matter tell who is talking. And worse, company meetings where a meeting room in London is connected to a meeting room in Dundee.

And as a result of our Zoom calls over the past year, I now know the names and faces of far more people in the London office. Which is good.

I hope we don’t lose the benefits of working from home when people start heading back into the office. Although my observation is that there is a significant minority who, like me, never want to go back.

We’re hiring again for data engineers. Part programming, part database work, and part systems work. Do you fancy working with big historic datasets?
https://apply.workable.com/findmypast/j/A80172A332/