Working On The Grid
October 17, 2021
Intro
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” - Steve Jobs
^ I recently read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and I highly recommend it. Such an incredible and inspiring life. I put the above quote as I believe it’s important to do what you want with your life and not to live based on others expectations of you or what you may think is required of you.
Working in tech things move incredibly fast and I can attest to that in just how much things have changed for me in the past year. As we all know in 2020 the pandemic was a real shock in the beginning. On my end I Faced a lay off and I also failed at launching my own company. I am proud of everything that has happened in-between and wouldn’t change a thing however. I recently left a phenomenal company (Banyan Air Service) in Fort Lauderdale back in September to join a fast growing medical software company. Banyan was a great experience and I had the pleasure of working with a bright team there. In just a little over a years time we were able to launch a mobile application for both our customers and employees to both iOs and Android app stores.
This leads me into the subject of this post. Although I was enjoying my time at Banyan working on our products there I was reached out regarding a new software engineer position. My new company Olive AI. An artificial intelligence company that is focused on automating tasks within the health care industry. It’s incredibly exciting to me how software has the potential to make such a big impact on an industry that is out dated (by means of technology) and the company is soon to have an IPO within the next year or so!
“The Grid”
My new position at Olive is remote which is a change for me as my experience at other companies was always in-person. I have been there for about a month now and I thought this would make for a good blog post to list some of the things that I am enjoying about working remote or “On The Grid” as Olive likes to put it.
Benefits
- FREEDOM - I really do think that a lot of companies could benefits from allowing their employees to work from home or to at least implement a hybrid type of environment to provide flexibility. I’ve noticed I have actually become increasingly more productive with my time. Olive is very structured with our meetings which makes sense since the organization has over a 1,000 employees it is necessary to meet often in order to keep everyone in sync.
- Comfort - I love the fact that I “go into the office” right from my couch (just kidding). I ended up building a new desk and setting up a nice area to work from home. My point being is that it’s so nice to be working from the comfort of home. Going into an office every single day for 8+ hours with translucent lights blaring on you and staring at a computer screen can be draining on the soul. I get that there are people who may enjoy that for their entire work life (45+ years) but that is just not me. I really do not think I’d move to a non-remote position unless they offered some sort of hybrid environment where I can go into the office a few days out of the week if I would like to.
- Productivity - I have really noticed that the remote life style has lead me to an increase in my productivity. I am working harder than I ever have before & I am also living a much healthier lifestyle cooking a lot more and going to the gym more regularly.
Personal blog by Alex Virdee, 