In Switzerland at least, it's very common to arrive very early in the morning (~6am), and then leave at 3pm. As long as you do your hours

No it isn't, not in any big multinationals, not unless you have some extremely specific agreement with management. More acceptable is say 7:30 - 16:30, and is still often seen as slacking by folks who stay till 6-7pm. Of course if you do consistently excellent work way above rest of the peers this doesn't matter.

The reason is trivial - if you are not around half of the time rest of the team is, teamwork suffers quite a bit (which is cca constant situation with distant remote places like India, ie if you have any questions in the afternoon you are blocked and they need to wait till next day)

>not in any big multinationals

Those aren't the only companies that exist.

But the only companies that pay well - at least here in Europe.

Having spent some time living in Zurich I call bullshit on this; the streets and train stations are _deserted_ at 6am. Shops are still getting deliveries, coffee shops are still closed.

No significant numbers of people - in Zurich at least - are starting work in offices at 6am.

A previous coworker used to get into the office early, around 7:00am because they dropped off their kid at school. They also left around 3pm. This is reasonable and would be accepted by any competent manager.

This is how I always worked over a 15 year developer career. I’d get in at 6 maybe take a 2 hour lunch break and then put a few more hours in until around 4pm as a standard pattern.

The vast majority of useful work I ever did was between the hours of 6-9am.

If someone choses to do it (and is not required) then why is it an issue?

I do 6:30am - 3pm and have done for years, it fits my day well. Others I work with might not start till 10am. Thats the great thing about working from home, you get more flexability in your start/end time. As long as you get your working hours done it's a total non issue.

When I was a PhD student and post-doc, I used to also arrive by 7am, and get most of my work done before anyone else arrived at 11am. I had all the equipment to myself, and enjoyed being able to settle in to the work day without having to interact with people.

Parent described what he did, in what way did he "glorify" this?

I agree with your sentiment but I think in this case, it's misplaced.

I generally left around 3pm to avoid the Austin rush hour traffic. Sure, I would occasionally stay late but I generally didn’t work much more than a 40 hour week. But this was Facebook games, with a daily release cycle, so there wasn’t really the crunch time that you would have seen at a AAA studio. They catered lunch every day but I almost always left and ate somewhere else.

Personally I appreciated the flexibility to work and leave early.