The girl at work spiked her CYA. She may look clear for now, but her pool is very likely not sanitary, and will not stay clear. You'll find her spending a ton of money shocking nearly weekly, if not weekly, going green more than once, blowing cash on algaecides, yellow out, and other pool store solutions, getting copper staining, spending hundreds more to try and sequester the copper, then finally draining her pool, spending hundreds of dollars on water and replacement chemicals due to what the pool store will call "chlorine lock". Then she'll start the process all over again, spending thousands and losing countless swimming hours to nasty green (or black, or yellow) algae. Your coworker may also have a different filter than yours, sand filters are great, but sometimes can struggle getting that last bit of fine-particulate cloudiness filtered out.
There are a number of folks on this site that haven't shocked in years. Not once. A few that might have spent a couple of days SLAMing to get rid of a problem because they noticed it off the bat. Numerous others haven't drained their pool in years.
The bleach is better simply because all it adds to the pool is salt and chlorine. That's it. You can get into the thousands of PPM of salt with no issues, and it will take years to reach that point. This versus solid chlorine which most often has CYA, which builds up and makes the chlorine less and less effective - and that buildup happens in a single season. More rarely solid chlorine has calcium in it, which also builds up, forcing a drain in a single season and causing all kinds of lovely hard water scale that you get to spend your weekends trying to scrub off of the tiles, water features, etc (especially if you already have hard water).
The first SLAM to get your pool in order usually takes the longest. This is unfortunate because it's the new folks that have to do this, and they don't have the benefit of years of easy and inexpensive maintenance to draw upon to understand the value of TFP.
If you keep up with your pool from here on out, you'll find you don't have to do this again. If something goes wrong down the road, future SLAMs, since you'll be keeping an eye on your chemistry and won't let things get out of hand, will likely resolve in a matter of a day or three, maybe a week depending.
I have lots of friends that go the pool store route, with a guy (or gal) that shows up once a week to dump a bunch of shock into the pool and maybe look at the pH. Their pools are often cloudy, usually green at least a couple of times during the season, and for this privilege, they get to spend $100/month or more. I spend around $18-20 for bleach each month, and that's the sum of my maintenance costs.
The best part is, looking at your pictures, you're so close to being done. The water is still a bit cloudy, but that should resolve very soon assuming your algae is dead.
So let's address that and do a quick SLAM review here to make sure we're not missing something:
Your CYA is still less than 30. Do you know how much less? Is it not registering, or registering less than 20? When is the last time you tested CYA?
What have you been maintaining your chlorine level at consistently, and how often are you testing and raising it?
Finally - a clear TFP Pool:
Nothing but bleach, CYA, and occasional muriatic acid to keep the pH in check.
Have you see her pool? It might be "clear" to her but I bet it is not TFP clear.
