The heated “Work from Home” debate of 2024 brought me back memories of my first programming job, when I joined a small “dotcom” startup in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and for the first few months of my employment I quite literally worked from home… in 1998.
The office where the FIS team members were working in Olivos was quite small, and they outgrew its capacity by the time I joined. I started in October 1997, first working from Switzerland (again, working as remotely as possible) and then in Buenos Aires, where I moved in January 1998.
As I landed in Buenos Aires, and seeing the limited physical space in that two-bedroom apartment transformed into an office, my boss took a sensible (and, in retrospect, incredibly clairvoyant) decision: she got me a USRobotics 57 kbps modem, asked me to install a second phone line at home, and to subscribe to the best possible dial-up Internet provider one could find at the time. My employer paid for the monthly costs of the phone line and the Internet connection. I used my personal laptop, a Pentium PC with Windows 95 I bought in Switzerland at the end of 1997.
The reasoning for my WFH situation was simple: my job consisted of connecting to and working on a website, hosted in a datacenter somewhere in the Eastern coast of the USA, day in, day out. This required an Internet connection; and the same Internet can be accessed everywhere.
Every morning, then, from January to July 1998, I woke up, prepared a thermos with hot water for my maté, and got to work. My daily routine went from crafting some web pages for customers, to later some Active Server Pages wisely mixing VBScript, SQL, and HTML with my beloved text editor EditPlus, to finally uploading everything to the server with WS-FTP.
The coordination with my colleagues happened via e-mail… and even chat! Yes, there was no Slack, but we had ICQ. And there was also phone calls, remember? After all, my Internet connection was using an ad hoc phone line, which meant that the other, original home phone line was available. (Kids: mobile phones weren’t that common in 1998, and I didn’t have one until 2000.)
It wasn’t possible, however, to have video calls as we do today with Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams; Skype wouldn’t exist until 2003, and even if it did, a 57 kbps modem was really not fast enough for such software to work properly.
For coordination and socializing I went to the office once or twice a week, and after a few months my boss asked me to go to the office every day as I got a few more responsibilities.
Did WFH work in 1998? Yes. We got lots of work done, we collaborated effectively, and it was, all things considered, a fantastic experience. These days I have to listen to so much bullshit around WFH by CEOs and managers from other companies and on the press, I’m thankful that my current employer fully embraces WFH.
These days, WFH and telecommuting are everyday concepts; back in 1998, it was a revolutionary idea, and I was lucky enough to experience it right at the beginning of my career.
WFH works. It’s as simple as that. Business managers must understand that the proper measurement of effectiveness should not be presence in the office, but actually getting things done. And you can totally do that from the comfort of your home, avoiding commuting, stress, rush hours, and traffic jams.