"Why can't you be here at 8:00am?"

"But I was the only person here at 7:00pm when the server fell over."

Lately I’ve been toying with running my own company, and if I did (which I probably won’t)...

Everything is 24/7 these days. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re trying to have all of our employees in the office during exactly the same hours the same five days a week, and then outsource to a place 12 time zones away which can cover most of the rest of the day, except that you can’t even have a meeting without inconveniencing literally everybody. It’s stupid, wearing a clown suit backward.

We should have heterogenous shifts. Say 9 days a fortnight with the 9th being a weekend. 25% of the staff is available on any weekend day, and everyone has one weekday off per week, and some fraction of the staff is available for extended hours the rest of the week.

That might mean that Scrum and scrumbut don’t work but I’m perfectly fine with that.

As much as I dislike having to play the game, late-in-late-out people can benefit by saving some email replies until the tail end of their workday...it always feels gross to me to do it intentionally, but I've found it'll often placate the types of busybodies who conflate arrival time with productivity.

I had a coworker who ended up working an hour more on average than everybody else because he would show up at 6 and try to leave at 3. But shit usually breaks around 3 and that’s plenty of time for people to complain about how you’re never around when we need you.

I tried to convince him to either work out or do a side project in the morning, or take at least an hour lunch every day. I wish I could remember what he ended up doing but it might have been “work somewhere else”.