In my view, a true professional shows up and gets the job done, no matter what. Asking employees to show up at 9 am on a reasonably consistent basis so that the team can work effectively seems like a pretty low bar to me (except in the case of special personal circumstances, of course).
She never complained. Yet we find problems sitting for 8 hours in an Aeron chair drinking micro-brew coffee with the freedom to check out Facebook or Amazon whenever we want.
Was my mom unhappy? Nope, she loved her job. Was she tired and burned-out at times? Absolutely. I think a lot of this has to do with perspective.
It strikes me that #1, #3 and a large part of #4 are not problems caused by the reduced hours but purely by the flexible hours. Do you think this system could've been more successful with more coordinated working schedules?
#2 on the other hand sounds like a systemic problem exacerbated by reduced hours, rather than caused by. It seems to hint at an imbalance in resource allocation in general, which is a problem worth addressing even with the increased hours.
Obviously I don't think software developers should be fired for rolling in at 8:02, but on my current team our start time is 100% personal preference, and the window is about 4 hours wide. If you added shorter schedules on top of the insanely flexible schedules, we'd basically have separate teams at that point.
Most places I think can only operate on one: shorter work days or more flexible work days. If you're going for the shorter work days, you need to be more strict about what time people arrive or it's a lot harder. Subsequently if you're super flexible about arrival and departure time, it's hard to maintain any team coherence unless everyone is putting in 8-9 hours a day.
None of this matters if the team is set up to handle remote work well and the majority of communication is written.
On your point on remote work, I don't really think this is true. One day response turnarounds can be a real pain in writing.
Ex: 9am to 1pm are core hours. You can adjust your hours around that time frame.
Or even, why not reduce the core hours? 10:00 to 12:00 ?
It's not like there's any dead time, for me at least, although it probably varies by industry. Back when I was in finance, we needed to be around whenever markets were open, if only to be able to run one-offs and answer questions for the traders.
In tech, there's always more to do. The bulk of the hard stuff isn't raw programming, it's doing the data analysis to figure out where problems are, trying to come up with experiments to run, documenting them so you don't repeat yourself six months later, and so on. On top of that, there's whiteboarding out ideas with people, teaching interns and more junior folks, meetings with aligned teams to share knowledge, manager-stuff (1:1s, planning), writing up docs (also to share knowledge), trying to learn how something works, etc.
I don't think I can manage more than a few hours of raw code time myself, but that's a pretty small slice of the things that need doing.
Isn't the point to do less work per day?
Force the sync mechanisms and processes to be "remote only" oriented.
* Instead of meetings, have discussion threads and deadlines for achieving a decision goal.
* Instead of face time, document requests and responses in a more formal way (and have an informal channel as well for sounding out ideas).
* Use a corporate owned chatting mechanism. IRC, Slack, some xmpp nightmare, just find something that works. Preferably run your own server.
* Maybe some jobs where already over capacity, divide the workload further.
A remote-only company hosting its own IRC instance is in no better position to succeed than a remote-only company reliant on Slack for communication. Yes, services shut down. Yes, DDoS attacks happen. But buildings also lose internet access, people trip over cables, etc. The weaknesses are different but one is not inherently better than the other.
- People who started early (~7am), left really early, and people who like to start much later (~10am). This led to only ~3 hour overlap time period when the majority of the dev team was in. There was a small effort to normalize the start times, but we could never find a common time that worked for everyone.
- I felt this put an obscene amount of pressure on some people (including myself) more so than others.
- People hate meetings, people beg and cry that meetings are a waste, but the bitter reality is ether you get everyone on the same page at once, or you need to do it separately, which becomes even more pressure for certain people. Combine this with the limited time when you can guarantee the majority of dev will be in, makes it difficult.
- The coop/intern students i felt got shafted hard by this, since time is so much more valuable during that two months they often got very little direction.
- I also personally found that about 6 of us (team leads/seniors) ended up with much more pressure, and stress due to trying to force 8 hours of work into 6 hours of a day.
In the end we ended up giving up on the idea, due in combination to other departments complaining, some HR payroll issues, and problems with coverage.