One Year of Adaptation: What Software and Science Teams Learned

Yesterday marked one year since the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. I’ve spent the last few days reading retrospectives on it, and the common thread across both software teams and research labs is the same: nobody had a plan for this, and everyone improvised something that mostly worked.

On the engineering side, the shift was almost comically fast. Companies that had resisted remote work for years, citing culture, security, collaboration, whatever, flipped to fully distributed operations in a matter of days. Standups moved to video calls, whiteboards became shared docs or Figma boards, and a whole ecosystem of async-first tooling got a crash course in real-world load. What’s interesting a year in is that a lot of teams aren’t just tolerating this setup, they’re actively defending it. Fewer interruptions, no commute, and a forced discipline around writing things down instead of relying on hallway conversations. I’d bet a decent chunk of that sticks around even once offices reopen, not because remote work is inherently superior, but because teams found processes that fit it and don’t want to unwind them.

The science side is the more dramatic story, honestly. Vaccine R&D that would normally stretch across many years got compressed into months, partly through money and urgency, but also through platform thinking. mRNA vaccine work benefited from years of prior groundwork that could suddenly be pointed at a single, well-characterized target. Labs that used to guard data and results until publication started sharing preprints and datasets essentially in real time. That kind of open, fast-iteration collaboration is normally rare in science, where the incentive structure rewards being first to publish, not being first to share. Whether that openness survives once the emergency passes is a genuinely open question. My guess is some of it does, especially preprint culture, but the underlying incentives for gatekeeping haven’t gone anywhere.

What might actually stick

A few things seem more likely than others to outlast the pandemic:

• Async-friendly workflows in software teams, because the tooling now exists and people have gotten used to it.
• Preprint-first sharing in fast-moving scientific fields, since it’s already normalized in a way it wasn’t a year ago.
• Cross-institution collaboration platforms built hastily for vaccine work, which could get repurposed for other large-scale research problems.

What’s less certain is whether the funding and urgency that made rapid science possible will persist once the immediate crisis fades. Compressed timelines were possible partly because resources got reallocated at a scale that’s hard to sustain indefinitely.

It’s a strange thing to write a “one year later” post while still very much inside the event rather than looking back at it from a safe distance. Vaccination campaigns are still ramping up, plenty of teams are still fully remote with no return date in sight, and it’s too early to say which of these adaptations are permanent versus a temporary crisis response. But the fact that we’re even asking “which of this sticks” a year in, instead of just “when does this end,” feels like a meaningful shift in itself.