In most engineering offices I've been into being a morning person would mean you have less overlap with everyone else, since coming in late and staying late is the norm.
In one company I consulted for, a morning person almost got fired when a regional manager noticed he left 2 hours earlier than everyone else. It was hilarious, in the saddest possible way.
This doesn't surprise me. Early in my career I tried to take advantage of flex time so I could miss commute traffic. I came in at 6:00 and tried to leave at 3:00. Three things would happen:
1) Managers scheduled meetings at 3:00 or even 4:00. "Yeah, I know you normally leave at 3:00, but this is the only time I could find where everyone was free." Dolt. I'm not free.
2) I'm sitting at my desk at 2:45 and someone walks in with a Problem. It's not something that can't wait until tomorrow in the great scheme of things. But they're planning to work until 7:00, and if I don't solve this problem they're going to be unable to do anything until tomorrow.
3) I'm in the groove. My fingers are flying, code is being created. Five or six mental balls are in the air. I'm in a mental state that doesn't happen all the time, or even every day. I don't want to stop, and it's time to go home. If I came in late like everyone else the longer I stay the better my commute. But since I came in early every minute I stay is two minutes I lose from my day. So do I shut down and leave, or do I mentally commit myself to staying for at least three more hours?
Beyond that, while being all alone is great if you have everything you need, I found people need input from me and vice versa quite a bit more often than I expected, which really cut down on the actual productivity.
This is problem with flex time. Companies love to advertise flex time, but when you come in at 7am and leave at 3, you get tons of looks and even the odd comment.
I recently had a chat with my direct supervisor. I told him I would like to start working flex time 8AM to 4PM and cut my lunch break to 30 minutes, eventually working 8AM to 4:30PM. He had a talk with his boss, gave me the O.K., I requested it in a written e-mail.
Since then, I come in at 08:00AM every morning, I get two and a half hours of productive work until people start coming in and the meetings start. Then I eat lunch and work for 3 more hours and I head for home. I never care about the looks I get from other people because I CMA.
What I want to say is that, as long as you have a Cover Your Ass document, you shouldn't care about how others negotiated their position.
I also requested extra days instead of a pay increase. Should I feel bad about that also?
This. Whenever I tell people to get stuff in writing to cover themselves, they think I'm just being a stickler and that doing so would just set a bad mood in the working relationship. But I've never found this to be true. Just be professional in negotiations and make everything crystal clear, because you can be sure that anything fuzzy or muddy is coming back in your face later, one way or another.
Also this:
> I also requested extra days instead of a pay increase.
If your extra days are paid (I'm assuming they are given the latter part) then it may well be a smarter deal fiscally even without the pay increase, particularly if your marginal tax is high.
You're extracting more value by working less, freeing your time up to do other things. Those other things may well end up netting you more money over time (working on your own company, for instance.) As well, depending on where you live and work, you may also end up paying a different tax rate on holiday pay over regular pay. If so you may be able to accrue those holidays and eventually receive a lump sum payout that is in effect "cheaper" than regular pay. The difference can be significant, particularly if your income is in the upper brackets.
This happened to me in my first job. I'm definitely a night-owl, but I was tired of coming in at 10-11 and leaving after dark, after everyone else including my boss had left, so I decided to change my routine and get up early and get to work by ~7-8. This worked great for about a week, until my boss started complaining about me leaving so early. So I switched back to my old routine of coming in really, really late, after everyone else did, and then leaving late after everyone else (but only barely, I'd just wait until everyone else was gone and then take off), but still only working 8 hours (maybe). Suddenly I was seen as a "hard worker" again.
Complaining might be a strong word, but I would definitely have a pithy comeback ready at the first sign of criticism, eg. "Ok, Mr. StartsAtEleven…", "early to bed, early to rise..", etc.
The tons of looks and odd comments bug the shit out of me. Being an engineer, my job is to produce, period. Don't worry about where it happens, just know that every time you pick up the phone and promise something that doesn't exist to someone else, the fact that it suddenly, magically, exists for you to show them is because people like me are plugging away around the clock. Dev work isn't 9-5. It's 24/7 and whenever the light bulb goes off.
well.. yes and no. you aren't developing in a vacuum unless you're the only dev in the company, and even in that case you'd have some coordination to do.
drives me nuts when I need to run something by a dev and he's gone at 2 pm and I need to wait till he gets into the beer-induced code rage mode at 10 pm and even then he might be on slack or maybe not :)
Just wondering what would you do if you need to run something by a Dev at, say, 5PM. Or 7. Or 10 in the night?
Or at 2am, when Asia woke up to a big change-request/bug/whatever?
It my case, things went beyond odd looks. You're technically obeying the company policy, so they can't punish you officially, but there are lots of ways to punish you unofficially for violating an unwritten social convention. In my case, suddenly I wasn't trusted with working on anything more complicated than the most basic bug fix.
Most companies I've dealt with had some sort of "core hours" policy in place.
Typically 8am - 4pm unless your job requires you to work with ppl in different time zones on a regular bases.
Anything outside of that would require your manager's approval. 7-3 is typically not a major issue with the exception that you'll stay later if need be for meetings/P1s (although that's a different can of worms) etc.
I thought the idea behind core hours was supposed to be less than 8 hours, as it's time everyone is guaranteed to be there, with wiggle at the beginning and the end, not just 'these are your hours'.
Like at a previous job, core hours was 10:00am to 4:00pm. Some people came in at 7:30am and left at 4:00pm, some people didn't get in until 10:00am and left at 6:30pm. But from 10 to 4, everyone was supposed to be there.
you're right. I should've went with 9-4 vs. 8-4. 10-4 is pretty generous, I personally never encountered a company with core hours officially starting after 9. That's not to say that I haven't encountered individuals showing up around 10 on a regular basis :)
Maybe I'm just insanely lucky, but having worked with a "biased-early" schedule for a number of tech companies in and out of Silicon Valley, I've not once witnessed looks or comments about when I go home. Now, if someone's strolling in at 11AM and leaving at 4PM (which I have seen often), they shouldn't be surprised if that behavior raises a few eyebrows.
That's not a problem with flex time, it's a problem with company culture. Flex time works where I work. We have people who come in early and leave early and we have people we regularly come it around lunch and stay until the lights go out.
And it's a strange thing in that it can be enforced via normal social interaction:
See you tomorrow.
Oh, is it that time already?
Leaving so soon?
Bye now.
And it may not be intentional, but it comes thru that way.
The easiest way to leave is to not say anything. Just grab your things and head out, which can come across as antisocial, but it avoids the awkwardness.
I always said something like "I came in late, so I'm leaving early." People usually didn't know what to do with that.
I've been working remotely for about 11 years. But my situation changed and I'll be commuting again. I'm actually looking forward to being in an office again.
Having young children can place constraints on your ability to shift work hours away from conventional 9-5. Childcare/schooling/etc are not as flexible in the schedules they follow, and not everyone has a spouse/partner with sufficient free time to compensate for your unavailability.
Another difficulty is that very young children don't always understand the concept of "daddy is working now and can't play". Hell, not all spouses understand the concept of "no, just because I'm home doesn't mean I can watch the kids while you go out and run errands". Being physically in an office somewhere else helps to prevent the lines between "work time" and "home time" from becoming blurred.
Never had problems explaining to the kids I'm unavailable during work time. You pretty much need a separate office room, of course.
Home time and work time do end up hopelessly intermingled, but it works both ways. The extra flexibility ends up giving me more time with my kids, I think.
School starts at 8.45 and ends at 15.30hrs here. Without shifting work hours, it's outright impossible to take care of kids with 2 working partners, unless you want the kids to spend a lot of time in aftercare etc. With shifting hours, it's possible by shifting both partners relative to each other, so IMHO this is a point in favor of flex hours. In reality, most families need help from grandparents, too.
Exactly. This is why people with children shouldn't also have jobs. At least one person needs to be at home to take care of the kids. However, with divorce so commonplace, you can't count on having one spouse earning an income any more, it's just too much of a risk, so I don't think anyone should have any kids at all. Having kids simply is not compatible with living in modern society. (No, this is not satire.)
You're not wrong. Women entering the workforce instead of staying home to mother children has a detrimental effect on families, despite receiving praise as social progress.
It's good for corporations because it doubles the labor supply, lowering wages for both men and women. States love it because they receive more income tax, since household work was previously untaxed. Families, especially children, are getting the shaft.
>Women entering the workforce instead of staying home to mother children has a detrimental effect on families, despite receiving praise as social progress.
It IS progress, for individual women or single moms who weren't lucky enough to hook up with a good-enough husband, or who didn't want to go the traditional family-and-kids route in life. It's been detrimental to society overall however because it's become a norm, and almost a requirement for families to earn enough to stay out of the ghetto; families don't feel they have the luxury to have only one working parent because the cost-of-living is too high, and also, many women feel (usually correctly) that they'd commit career suicide by taking off a few years to be a stay-at-home mom, because companies don't value this and see workers who take a few years' break as no longer employable.
>Families, especially children, are getting the shaft.
The ability for one spouse to forego work in lieu of dedicating themselves to childcare is a privilege not enjoyed by a substantial percentage of parents. Besides that, the choice to have kids (or not) remains in this country one everyone is entitled to make.
Do you have a solution? From what I see, parents simply have no time to actually spend with kids, they have to spend the equivalent of a full apartment rent on daycare, the cost of raising kids properly is utterly unaffordable, and the cost of living and healthcare makes it impossible for one parent to stay home instead of both having jobs, and the very high probability of divorce makes it foolhardy to enter into such an arrangement in the first place. On top of all that, the time needed to get an education and get established professionally makes it very difficult to have a kid before you're 30, and the older you are the higher the likelihood of birth defects or autism or Down's syndrome. Society isn't going to do anything to help you in raising your kids, so unless you're lucky to have some really great extended family or something, it's just way too much of a risk and an expense.
I fail to see how this is "off the deep end", this is just the reality of modern American society.
the older you are the higher the likelihood of birth defects or autism or Down's syndrome
For what it's worth, we've been getting really good at identifying these very early with tests that also hold little or no risk to the mother and baby (e.g. NIPT with free-cell fetal DNA). Of course, if there's moral objections to terminating such pregnancies even in the very early stages, that doesn't help.
reality of modern American society.
Yeah, that explains a lot. I understand daycare and healthcare aren't really subsidized here, apparently American society has problems with distributing the costs of childbearing over the population in order to encourage it. I guess they'll keep the population demographics at a sustainable level by immigration or something.
I have to disagree about the testing bit with autism; from what I understand, that doesn't even show up until a kid is a couple years old or more. Anecdotally, I have two friends with kids, and both their kids are mildly autistic. I think, in both cases, the mothers were in their early 30s.
>I guess they'll keep the population demographics at a sustainable level by immigration or something.
Yep, that's exactly what they're doing. The people having all the kids are either immigrants (esp. Hispanic ones), or ultra-religious Christians. All the people supporting "liberal" values aren't having any kids because it's too much time and money. So I think we can look forward to something somewhat similar to what happened to the Islamic world: it used to be at the forefront of science and math, and then turned into what it is today when the clerics took over.
Many other cultures (and even many of my relatives) frame the task of rearing children as means to better ensure for your own care towards the end of your life, rather than as a high-risk endeavor comparable to purchasing real estate.
I've heard of this, but what kids actually stick around to take care of their parents when they're old? In fact, isn't that rather cruel? By the time the parents are unable to take care of themselves (if they get to that state; lots of elderly people are fully mobile and capable of taking care of themselves), their kids will now have their own kids, and it will be flatly impossible for them to both have two jobs, take care of their kids, and take care of their parents all at the same time. That's an unreasonable expectation to have of your children.
Apparently this is the case in Singapore, which relies on family support instead of welfare. Retired parents can even sue their children if they fail to adequately support them, according to this Economist article:
In one company I consulted for, a morning person almost got fired when a regional manager noticed he left 2 hours earlier than everyone else. It was hilarious, in the saddest possible way.