I'm writing this from my kitchen table, which is now my office, as it is for a great many people this week. The situation has changed with a speed none of us were ready for: a week ago we worked in an office together, and now we don't, and nobody can honestly tell you for how long. So this is a field note from inside a sudden, involuntary experiment in remote working — how a data team has scrambled to keep functioning, what's held up better than I feared, and what we're quietly missing. It's written in the middle of it, with no idea how it ends, which feels like the honest way to write it.

The thing that saved us: the work was already in the cloud

Here's the piece of luck I keep being grateful for, and it's worth naming because it's not luck exactly — it's a decision that turned out to matter enormously. Because our data platform lives in Azure, the work itself didn't have to move. The pipelines, the storage, the analytics, the dashboards — none of it was on a machine in the office that we now can't reach. It was in the cloud, accessible from anywhere with a connection, exactly as accessible from my kitchen as from my desk.

I don't think I fully appreciated, until this week, that "the infrastructure is in the cloud" quietly means "the team can work from anywhere." We'd adopted cloud for scale and cost and capability, not for pandemic resilience — nobody was planning for this. But a team whose systems live on-premises, in a building they can no longer enter, is having a categorically worse week than we are. The cloud migration that was about elasticity turned out, by accident, to be about continuity. There's a lesson in there about how the benefits of a good decision often show up in forms you never predicted.

So the systems side of going remote was, honestly, almost a non-event. Which threw into sharp relief that the hard part of remote work was never going to be the technology.

What actually broke: the informal layer

The systems came with us. What didn't come with us — what I hadn't valued properly until it vanished overnight — was the entire informal layer of how a team actually works. The stuff that has no meeting invite and no tool.

  • The overheard question. So much of how a data team stays aligned happens in the ambient hum of sharing a space: the half-heard conversation that makes you go "wait, you're touching that table too?", the question you lob over your shoulder without booking a call, the thing you learn because you happened to be nearby. All of that just... stopped. Remotely, every interaction has to be deliberate — a message sent, a call scheduled — and the friction of deliberateness kills the small, constant, unplanned exchanges that turn out to have been load-bearing.
  • The whiteboard. Data work is full of things you understand by drawing them — a data flow, a model, an architecture. Standing at a whiteboard together, drawing and gesturing and rubbing out, is how a lot of our thinking actually happened, and it does not translate cleanly to screen-sharing. We're managing, with shared digital tools, but there's a fluency lost in not being able to point at the same wall.
  • The reading of the room. You calibrate constantly, in person, on signals you don't consciously notice — is this person stuck, is that one frustrated, is now a bad time. Remotely those signals thin out, and you realise how much of keeping a team healthy ran on ambient information you're now flying without.

None of these is a technology problem with a technology fix, which is precisely why they're the hard part. You can't buy your way out of the loss of the informal.

What we're doing about it

We're improvising, like everyone, and a few things are helping enough to write down:

  • Making the implicit explicit, on purpose. Since the ambient sharing is gone, we're forcing more of it into deliberate form — a bit more over-communication, a bit more "here's what I'm working on and where I'm stuck" said out loud, because the version that used to happen by osmosis now has to be intentional or it doesn't happen at all.
  • Protecting some unstructured contact. A scheduled call is efficient and it is not the same as being around each other. We're deliberately keeping some low-purpose, human contact — the remote equivalent of the corridor chat — because a team that only ever meets to transact business slowly stops being a team.
  • Being kinder about the mess. Everyone is doing this from a kitchen or a bedroom, with the rest of life visibly in frame, under a background stress none of us chose. A bit of grace about the chaos — the interruptions, the imperfect setups, the off days — is not a soft nicety right now. It's what keeps people functioning.
Our systems went remote in an afternoon because they were already in the cloud. Our team is the hard part — because a team runs on a thousand informal, ambient, unscheduled human moments that don't survive being moved to a screen, and no tool gives those back.

Writing this from the middle

I don't know how this goes. Maybe it's weeks, maybe longer; maybe some of this becomes permanent, maybe we're all back in the office by summer having half-forgotten it. From inside it, I can't tell, and I'm suspicious of anyone claiming they can.

But two things already feel true enough to commit to the page. First, the cloud decision we made for entirely different reasons is the thing letting us keep working at all, and I'll never again think of "where does the infrastructure live" as a purely technical question — it's a resilience question, revealed as one by a scenario nobody modelled. And second, the real work of a team was never the systems; it was the human layer around them, and I only learned how much of that layer existed by watching it disappear overnight. Whatever else this strange period teaches me, it's already taught me not to take the informal, ambient, human part of working together for granted — because it turns out to have been holding up far more than I knew, right up until the week it wasn't there.