WFH West County: Zooming In

Part 2 - Technological change enabled working from home for many. Meet a lawyer and a virologist.

This is the second of a five-part series that looks at the shift to remote work in Sebastopol and West County, what might be considered a hidden-away-at-home workforce. WFH is changing where and how people work today, offering a good living in a good place to live and work. Catch up on Part 1: Work from where you want to live.

The pandemic forced almost everyone adapt to working from home. It also accelerated the adoption of new technologies that expanded opportunities to work with others from home.

Before Covid, people working from home were "telecommuting" or “teleworking.” They used teleconferencing systems and dial-up modems. Now many have high-speed Internet over the wire or Starlink at home. Covid brought videoconferencing systems like Zoom into mainstream use. Zoom became its own verb and the label for a Generation Z who used Zoom for school during the pandemic. “Can we jump on Zoom?” has become a common request.

Zoom became a stock-market phenom, once valued at $139 billion, but its market cap plummeted to $18 billion by 2024 as its revenue growth leveled off.

Still, think about how many people knew nothing about using Zoom and now are as familiar with it as doing email. Increasingly, face-to-face communications happens online, even for people who work in an office but work with people in other offices or at home. An interesting trend is that the majority of job interviews now happen online and some are predicting that the interviewer won’t be a person, but an AI avatar asking you to explain your resume.

Other technologies have also become commonplace and give people more flexibility. Smartphones give everyone the ability to do work while on the move. (It’s not uncommon to see people joining a Zoom call from a car — as a passenger or after having parked, hopefully.) Cloud computing enabled the secure sharing of data with distributed employees. With Google Docs and Sheets, people can edit documents with others in real-time, eliminating the need to send documents back and forth among collaborators.

Lawyer Jeffrey Kross relies uses the phone rather than video conferencing to work with clients from his home office in Sebastopol. For scientist Neil Parkin, tools like Zoom allow him as a consultant to connect with colleagues in different countries.

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WFH Profile: The Lawyer in Pajamas

Jeffrey S. Kross, Criminal Appeals Counsel

“In 2008, I traded a downtown Oakland office for my spare bedroom.” Long before Covid, Jeffrey Koss began working from home, eventually moving from Oakland to Sebastopol. Koss has had a commute to work of “approximately ten steps.” Working from home, he said, “has allowed me a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of my day-to-day activities, as well as vacations.”

Kross is an attorney appointed by the Court system in California to represent indigent criminal defendants. “Under the California constitution, prisoners are afforded the right to appellate counsel for free,” Koss explained. “So I function as the public defender, but I'm on a statewide level. I'm not limited to the county.” He handles cases for all six separate Courts of Appeal in California.

“The beauty of this job, which largely compensates for the woefully underpaid hourly wages we make, is that we get to do it at home,” said Koss. Trial transcripts from every trial that he reviews get delivered to his house. “In the old days, we used to have to leave our house to go to the law library to do legal research, but for about 20 years or so, we've had online legal databases. So we can do all of our legal research at home.” A more recent change is that he is able to file court briefs electronically from his computer instead of having to print them out and carry them to the post office.

“Realistically, the only reason I need to leave my home for the job is because I maintain a downtown Sebastopol post office box and that's just obviously so my clients don't know where I live. Most of my clients are in prison for life but the ones I can get out of prison love me and the ones that I can't get out of prison don't like me so much.” He doesn’t travel to prisons, which are all over the state. He communicates with prisoners by phone or text, never by video. “No, no, never,” he said about face to face meetings.

“Many many years ago, when my eight-year-old niece asked me what I did for a living,” he said. “I explained to her basically what I'm telling you now. And she looked at me and she said, ‘you're the lawyer in pajamas.’

When Kross got out of law school in the late 80s, he worked as a criminal defense lawyer in downtown Oakland. “I was living in Oakland at the time and I did four years of trial work, which is almost like a 24-hour, seven days a week occupation.” He and his wife moved up to Sebastopol in 2008, but he was working from his home in Oakland before eventually starting to work from home in Sebastopol.

“The good thing about this job is it's portable. So I can work pretty much wherever I happen to live,” he said. “Fortunately, we ended up in Sebastopol where I told my wife I would never leave.” His wife, who is now retired, had worked as an accountant. “For many years, she worked as the controller for a bilingual school, an English-Spanish school in Oakland. When we moved up here, she was commuting back to Oakland three or four days a week, which was really miserable.” He said that Covid was “the best thing for her that ever happened because at that point she was able to work from home exclusively.”

“When we bought this house, the prior owner was a land surveyor or something and he was also very handy with woodworking and such.” There are wooden shelves on both walls with stacks of transcripts. “This was all built into this spare bedroom. It was a perfect office for me.”

He doesn’t think he’ll retire anytime soon. “As I say apart from the pay, it's a really terrific way of making a living. I mean it does have its downsides. I occasionally get death threats in the mail and they tell me, you're the worst lawyer ever, but that's not really such a problem. It doesn't dissuade me.” He doesn’t mind working by himself. “It's funny because my clients send me Christmas cards, (addressed) to you and your staff and it's just me.”

Kross doesn’t mind not going into an office. “I have many friends that I see outside of work hours. And I don't have to rely on colleagues to be my friends. Plus on a nice day, I'll get up and instead of going to the office, I'll take a bike ride for two hours and then I'll come home and work. So my schedule is very, very flexible.”

Kross is not the only court-appointed counsel working in the area. “I know probably upwards of 15 or so in the greater West County area. I know maybe like three, four, five who maintain PO boxes at the Sebastopol Post Office that I bump into on a regular basis.”

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WFH Profile: “If I want to work three days a week, I can”

Neil Parkin - Virologist

Neil Parkin is a molecular biologist and virologist, a PhD scientist who once worked in research labs. Since 2009 he has worked from home as a consultant.

“I worked in academia, industry and public health including a stint at WHO in Geneva before becoming a consultant,” he said. Until recently he consulted for WHO, managing a quality assurance program for international diagnostic labs testing for HIV drug resistance.

As a consultant based in California, he had to be on calls with collaborators in multiple time zones in Europe, Asia and Africa. A lot of the work he does now is technical writing, preparing articles for scientific journals. It is “very technical, very niche” but he likes it and he enjoys working independently from home.

He describes his day as variable. “I can pretty much set my own work hours as a consultant. If I want to work three days a week, I can.” He spends most of his day at a computer. He has clients with offices in Europe and in the Bay Area.

“I make an effort to go visit those offices about once a year. It’s worth it to meet the people I work with face to face now and then.” But as an introvert, he doesn’t feel lonely or the need for daily in-person interactions at work. He is glad to have communities outside of work (golf, ice hockey) for social activities.

Neil and his wife moved from a Bay Area suburb to a home on Ross Station Road about six years ago. “Once my wife retired from her job at Stanford, there was no reason to stay where we were living,” he said. They decided to move to West County, just before COVID hit. That’s also when he jumped on the Zoom wave, something he was already familiar with – so it was a relatively easy adaptation.

As a virologist, Neil watched the COVID epidemic evolve with great interest. “There was so much nobody knew, there were new data to incorporate every day, and researchers and public health officials did the best they could with limited and constantly changing information,” he said. Many colleagues he knew switched from working on HIV to SARS-CoV2.

“Working from home has been the best thing for me, I love the flexibility and comfort of my home office”, he added. “If there were any upsides to the COVID pandemic, one of them would be the widespread adoption of online meeting platforms and availability of technology that allows remote conference participation.”