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The problem is that the majority of people don't work this way. It's difficult for a business to have meetings when a portion of the staff has decided to come

The problem is that the majority of people don't work this way. It's difficult for a business to have meetings when a portion of the staff has decided to come in around noon and the other portion comes in at 9am. You can try switching meetings around, but there is only so much time in the day. Update: I was pretty rational with this discussion and it was still down voted. Either: 1) I have people following me and down voting the majority of my posts (which I suspect is happening to some degree) or 2) HN users aren't realistic.

wutbrodo 11y ago
Meh, my last company/team had work hours that were almost completely flexible. My team had one weekly 10 o clock meeting that I had trouble making consistently (I had a longer commute than most), and we moved it. It's honestly not _that_ universally difficult, because in practice "completely flexible work hours" means that there will be a good few mid-day/afternoon hours during which everyone is around, and lumping the meetings into that time works perfectly well. Obviously the extreme case as described in this article would make it more difficult, but for most people I don't see why it wouldn't work and even the extreme case people would be somewhat better off.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  That's fine for scheduled meetings, but what about unscheduled collaboration? Every time the issue of remote work comes up there is a camp that insists companies need their engineers collocated for communication reasons. It seems that allowing completely flexible schedules like this has similar issues. How do you address that?
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    My company wasn't a fan of fully remote work (as opposed to periodic wfh) for the same reasons, and I agree with them. I didn't find that to be a problem at all though because bilateral communication is much easier to do over email/IM/videochat/etc.

wutbrodo 11y ago

Meh, my last company/team had work hours that were almost completely flexible. My team had one weekly 10 o clock meeting that I had trouble making consistently (I had a longer commute than most), and we moved it. It's honestly not _that_ universally difficult, because in practice "completely flexible work hours" means that there will be a good few mid-day/afternoon hours during which everyone is around, and lumping the meetings into that time works perfectly well. Obviously the extreme case as described in this article would make it more difficult, but for most people I don't see why it wouldn't work and even the extreme case people would be somewhat better off.

vonmoltke 11y ago
That's fine for scheduled meetings, but what about unscheduled collaboration? Every time the issue of remote work comes up there is a camp that insists companies need their engineers collocated for communication reasons. It seems that allowing completely flexible schedules like this has similar issues. How do you address that?
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  My company wasn't a fan of fully remote work (as opposed to periodic wfh) for the same reasons, and I agree with them. I didn't find that to be a problem at all though because bilateral communication is much easier to do over email/IM/videochat/etc.