Home Office working
The thing I remember most about the day was that I was already in a turf war with corporate IT about home working policy. For 4 years we were given a RSA key that allowed us to VPN into the corporate LAN allowing me to RDP to my work laptop. This was in no ways perfect since often it would not work well, but adequate for the 5 or 6 days required, but when I complained about it they were aghast and said this was not allowed (I'm an embedded developer so taking all the kit home from work is generally not an option). Instead they said I would need 2nd corporate laptop loaded with the IT spyware. However I knew that getting this past the corporate bean counters would be a nightmare (They had already balked at paying for a "engineering" class laptop, deciding that since the standard was good enough for excel it was good enough for anybody )
Then we were told we had to go home, and there was a mass scramble for any kit that could be used. Those who had opted for towers rather than laptops, found themselves dragging huge pieces of iron back home, plus screens and their development kit. I was rather lucky here. Due to my argument about which laptop to get I had been delivered two corporate laptops, one which was stuck in my draw waiting to be returned, still boxed. I turned it on, loaded it with the corporate software, checked it connected to the LAN, outlook etc and took that home allowing me to RDP into my kit. (I still periodically get emails complaining I have two laptops which I file in the "not living in the real world" column)
The next problem was setting a home office up. Fortunately I have my own space, but we also now had my wife who was also working from home and my two teenage children all furloughed from school and university. Again I was fortunate, not only by being an inveterate IT hoarder (much to my wife's disgust, but now relief) so I had enough spare ethernet switches, USB hubs, screens, keyboards and mouses to setup basically 4 work stations, but I had only recently moved from ADSL to fibre broadband (although not the super fast variety). Initially there were worries that it would not support the parallel zoom and team video talks, but has held up pretty well especially after I added powerline wifi extenders.
and to give corporate IT their due, they rolled out a VPN solution quickly which allowed pretty well seamless VPN connection without the need for a RSA key (as long as you were lucky enough to win the laptop lottery)
However I am one of the lucky one. I have a reasonable broadband connection, a big enough house so that we are not jumping on top of each other and enough IT kit and knowhow to get it working and maintain it. Many, including some of my colleagues, were not so lucky and for many it has been a real struggle
It also proves to me that what IT says is not possible is often down to inertia and intransigence. The ability to do this has been around for years, but due to management suspicion (if you work from home, how can we trust you) lack of foresight and simple inertia it never was
However the big takeaway is that for years there was big resistance to home working, but that has been blown out of the water. It will be interesting to see how many companies revert back to type when all this is over. My feeling is that the genii is out the bottle, and for me any forcing back to the status quo is just not going to work. This raises the issue of what they will do with those expensive offices in an around London when people realise that they can do their job just as well without the expensive commutes