Man, am I glad I do not work on your team. If you judge coming in late or going early as inappropriate, as opposed to measuring actual results, then you have failed as a leader already. Sorry.
The agreement between me and my employer is that I work 40h per week, and deliver value during that time. Apart from that there is an understanding that I can work slightly more or less depending on workload and deadlines. What's important is that the long term average is never more than 40 (that would indicate and encourage bad estimates and bad deadlines). If I need to pick the kids up at 4 I pick them up at 4, deadline or not. If an employer felt it was a problem that I need to pick my kids up at 4 on deadline day they need to find another deadline or another developer.
Regarding work hours - I'm not expected to be in my seat during specific hours but should be available during office hours. Having teammates who cooperate not work overlapping hours would be very bad for productivity. If I need to do some extra hours I try to d them late at night, but it wouldn't be acceptable for a team member to do all their work at night, when no one else is working. Direct communication is important.
Be careful of this attitude nowadays. There's lots of people getting into software development these days, and there's lots that will work for less money than you. There's also a lot of managers that would love to pay someone less, regardless of their quality.
I know it's always been that way to some degree, but the problem seems to be growing exponentially as the years go on and more "developers" flood the market fresh out of school and racked with debt.
Sure, but I do expect that folks on my teams are spending about ⅓ of their lives—or 8 hours/day—working. I've been on teams where the majority of the team appear to spend about 6 hours a day actually in the office, and don't appear to be working (although of course they may be thinking/reading/learning) more than that.
That seems undesirable.
> You're either getting shit done or you're not
It's not a boolean; it's a rational. One gets so much quality stuff done over time. Those who produce more quality features over less time are more valuable than those who produce fewer, more broken features over more time.
This was sort of my point. If people don't want to work they'll find a way to not work regardless of whether they're in a seat.
> It's not a boolean; it's a rational. One gets so much quality stuff done over time. Those who produce more quality features over less time are more valuable than those who produce fewer, more broken features over more time.
Sure, but because of the above it can be difficult to tell whether two people who are equivalently productive are both working equivalently hard. At the end of the day, if they're delivering value proportional to their compensation, you're probably going to keep paying them.
These two sentences directly contradict one another. If an employee is working 4 hour days and accomplishing more than their peers working 8 hour days, why do you expect them to spend 8 hours a day working—especially when you yourself have already said the former is more valuable?
In my experience, people who are able to get quality work done in shorter amounts of time typically produce lower-quality work when forced to work longer hours. Shouldn't you be encouraging this?
> These two sentences directly contradict one another.
Nope, not at all.
> If an employee is working 4 hour days and accomplishing more than their peers working 8 hour days, why do you expect them to spend 8 hours a day working—especially when you yourself have already said the former is more valuable?
Because time marches on, whether or not someone is working. The whole reason I want someone who's productive in a shorter amount of time is that once he's done producing one thing he can get started on something else.
The idea that you only measure results is a worse situation for the engineering team than measuring time.
If we only measure results, then a piece of work can be estimated to be "a week's work", and then the engineer is expected to deliver on that estimate and have it done by the end of the week, even if that means working overtime.
I don't want that. I want to be able to tell my team that, if they did a solid week's work on it, and it's not done then that means our estimates were out and we'll adjust the plan. But that is measuring time - they did a week's effort even though they didn't get the intended result.
The flip-side is that if something is estimated to be "a week's work" and they get it done in 3 days, then I don't expect them to take the next 2 days off. Rather, it means that our estimates were off (in the opposite direction) and we'll pick up some additional work this week.
To me, "taking 2 days off" and "only working 5 hour days" are essentially the same thing. So if I had a team member who told me "the task I was assigned for this week is actually pretty easy, so I decided to just finish at 2pm each day", then I'd consider that wildly inappropriate and tell them so.
In the same way, if a manager told an engineer "the task you were assigned this week is really hard, so you're probably going to need to work until 9pm each day" that would be wildly inappropriate.
I don't care very much what hours my team work, as long as it's effective - which includes having enough overlapping office time do have in depth technical discussions, and so they can provide mentoring and advice to junior team members (or get advice if they are the junior). But if someone is "coming late and going early" (direct quote from the article, but the emphasis is mine) then they're not doing the job that they're hired for, and we need to discuss why.
Most engineers aren't employed (paid) based solely on results - and don't want to be, they want to know that if they do their hours, then they've done the job. But conversely, if they haven't done their hours, then they haven't done their job.
My team has a feature and bug backlog half a mile long; I could clone myself and still not run out of work. And even if I did manage to close out the backlog, there's more work which could be done towards company goals.
Most probably because measuring employees by results and not by hours usually means working overtime, not leaving early.
If an employer sees you leaving early while getting things done, why shouldn't she just give you more work?
If they're the same thing, I guess you'd have no problem with a programmer who comes in and does 40 hours straight across 1.9 days, and takes the other 5.1 days off, right?
Not right, I guess. Because there's something wrong with your statement: it's based on the assumption that all hours are the equivalent. But they're not. The longer you're at work, the more mentally fatigued you get.
How many times have you worked on something in the evening, only to come back at it the next morning with a fresh mind and realize previous few hours of effort were a complete waste of time, and actually a different direction was needed?
You need to step back from something in order to get perspective, both literally and figuratively. When you're tired, nearing the end of the day, it's very easy for your higher brain function to go to sleep and to start bulldozing your way through problems using willpower alone. And you'll do a dreadful job.
Incorrect estimation is a completely different topic, because it's a different mechanism at work. Presenteeism is a symptom of management's inability to measure the productivity of an hour's labour during the day. An hour at 5pm might be only 10% as productive as an hour at 11am, or it could even be net negative. Nothing to do with estimates.
Personally I believe I have between 4 and 6 hours of productive programming labour in me per day. I'm only good for meetings and occasional discussion the rest of the time. I don't try and write any complex code past 4pm, because I know from experience I'll write it much better the next morning.
Why is it inappropriate though? Employee happiness is also a part of compensation. Or at least it should be.
In a hypothetical situation I would gladly trade a few Ks off my salary for more flexible hours.
> They looked up to me for leadership and that also meant defining what was and what was not allowed.
I'm guessing he's just paraphrasing what went on. People judging the person who came late and left early. The leader might know what is going on, but maybe the person itself keeps it for themselves. Then others might wonder why just one person gets so much leeway. This is basically lack of understanding and trust.
Secondly, he seems to indicate that sometimes people might come in late and leave early while he doesn't know at all why it is happening.
He's from the Netherlands so can relate a bit more (though I don't work in IT). There are loads of people who just do their time. Meaning, come in on time, follow their lunch time exactly, leave on time. This because their value their personal life and work is just something you do. If you have lots of such people, they won't understand why the rest doesn't do the same. Leading to resentment, etc.
Where I work someone has been taking loads of personal time for the last 3 years. Think of a minimum of 0.5 day/week and this excludes taking days off. Everyone understands why, and there's no issue. However understanding a manager might be, you also have to deal with the entire team as well as other teams. That you know why you did something or that your manager knows still might not be enough.
Surely the principle of charity dictates that the quoted passage be interpreted to mean "coming in late/leaving early to the extent that it damages productivity/morale".
I mean sure, the author might have meant that he judges people solely by their hours and not their results, but in context it doesn't seem likely.
Sometimes its a negative result of excessive stress or unrealistic goals. Bosses boss says do this two week in one week, boss says OK, inevitable fail, called on carpet, well dev A was sick with flu and dev B was five minutes late to work (LOL as if that matters). Next week the boom falls on sick days and being five minutes late. Sometimes bosses boss knows this is a stupid tactic and hopes the noob boss has a learning experience. I had a bosses boss who actually did that to me. I thought he was a complete ass for doing it, but punishing my guys was an effective way of stopping me from making dumb excuses in the future, so I haven't done that in 20+ years, at least not knowingly.
On a few rare occasions I've seen it as very poor communications. "Must be done before Tuesday" so nobody works on it over the weekend, when inexperienced boss really meant "Must be done ASAP like right now even if it is 2am on Saturday". Noob bosses need to learn to communicate. If you need all direct reports to show up for the staff meeting once a month with your boss on Wednesdays don't talk down to the employees and tell them to all show up at 8am every morning when they only really have to on rare occasion.
I've also seen incompetent middle managers enforce it on lower level managers to avoid certain discussions, as a punishment, essentially. I want someone else to take your job, so your direct reports are going to be screwed over until you fail and you are replaced. Or to appear more active and in touch, "I'm not just a pencil pushing idiot I have a really great plan to track who's late from lunch because I care because my eval says I need to care more, therefore you will support my dumb idea". Often there is nothing the lower level manager can do to improve those situations.
The above are personal anecdotes I've experienced in forays into lower level management. Other, perhaps better examples, do exist.
Such an approach to 'management' and workplace culture is likely to encourage and reward the perception of 'hard work' rather than actual performance and outcomes. This drives out high-performance, goal-oriented individual contributors who aim to work efficiently.
That said I wish all 'team leads' shared their thoughts as transparently online; that way prospective employees can more easily self-select and identify the companies and teams they wish to join.
Usually even if CEO, CTO (etc.) understands the logic behind it they still have this paranoid thought: What if my employee is actually slacking off instead of just being very efficient? How can I know? Maybe if I make everyone sit at their desk for 8 hours I can avoid being overrun by a bunch of slackers?
There are some highly talented developers with great interpersonal skills who just happen to have e.g. delayed sleep phase. They might leave "early" to have a normal evening with family or run errands, but then work more at night while they're awake with time to burn.
Of course, that doesn't accommodate people with severe delayed phase or whatnot, but often that stuff can either be worked out either on a team-by-team basis or arranged as part of the hire. Or maybe you only enforce the "scheduled" part, and put a "24 hours in advance minimum" on it to keep things humane. The important thing is to get team expectations in place.
What doesn't really work is "around whenever they feel like it," assuming there's any inter-team dependency at all. Even with an email SLA, that gets obstructive pretty quickly.
It has the virtue of assuring that we are all available in person to one another, which is actually pretty valuable.
Having coworkers just showing up and leaving at any random time during the day I think messes with morale/vibe of the office. And as another commentor pointed out, communication. I like to know the general time-range I can find an employee to speak to. I'm old-school and still appreciate face-to-face time over online tools. If the expectation is set at the beginning that "Jane is a telecommuter Mon,Wed,Fri". Ok, that's fine. I don't like the idea of "Jane just shows up whenever she wants to, but she's getting her JIRA tickets done within the sprints and shows up to meetings".
Basically, while schedules definitely don't need to be rigid... they also shouldn't be fully impromptu either. If you're not telecommuting, I believe it is valuable to be physically around during office hours.
I absolutely agree that it is important to be around during office hours, especially to take advantage of mentoring opportunities. Taking the time to sit down with a more junior employee and help them figure out their next step is incredibly valuable. There doesn't need to be any rigidity to office hours to accomplish that though. I would be taken aback if a lead came to talk to me about work hours, unless I had become nocturnal.
That's a weird opinion to hold. You should change it. It hasn't been true in any company I've worked in for the past ~8 years.
> I don't like the idea of "Jane just shows up whenever she wants to, but she's getting her JIRA tickets done within the sprints and shows up to meetings".
This sounds like the perfect situation to be in, both for an employee and an employer.
a.k.a you like to interrupt people on a whim. Show some respect and just schedule a meeting.
Reducing human interaction to schedules and timetables is one of the worse social diseases of this profession and I am personally very much done with playing nice with the people who wish to coddle them. Your coworkers are no less important than you are, and sometimes they have the temerity to need you for a human interaction at a time not in your calendar. I am certain you and your precious, all-self-important flow can deal with it.
If every single person in the office decided on a custom, non-overlapping schedule, how productive do you think that would be? Unless you're open to answering e-mails and IMs at home and on the go at all hours.
That didn't last long.
If you want true flexibility and control over your schedule, the best option is to become a freelancer or consultant. But keep in mind that in many cases your clients will also have expectations around your schedule and availability.