6 ms·

Getting Real About Office Hours

101 points by mikeyur 17y ago

jfornear 17y ago
I agree with this post 100%. Working from home mostly leads to working longer and less productive hours. You need to separate your work place from your living space. Does it not seem like a conflict of interest to anyone else that 37signals preaches the work-from-home lifestyle while selling remote collaboration tools?
- odonnell 17y ago
  How does that constitute a conflict of interest? They make software that they find useful.
  - jfornear 17y ago
    It's not a conflict of interest per se. I think I just consciously try to ignore their blog because I feel like its purpose is to sucker you into buying their stuff.
    - euroclydon 17y ago
      If you find one that's not, let me know!
- aasarava 17y ago
  It depends on the individual. I've worked from home for the past three years and have never been more productive. When I was in an office, the constant interruptions by coworkers, the uncomfortable lighting, the uncomfortable seating, the false privacy of a cubicle, the endless meeting requests, the cooing over someone's new baby, the barking of someone's dog, the constant pressure to attend someone's birthday celebration in the kitchen or going-away party in the lobby or baby shower in the meeting room -- all of it kept me from doing my best work. My living space and work space are the same. But on most days, I'm out the bedroom door at 6pm and in talking to my wife and playing with my son in the kitchen at 6:01pm. Happiness and productivity are very tightly linked.
  - pxlpshr 17y ago
    That's because you had a terrible work environment and you're honey mooning, not because working from an office is evil. Separating life and work is generally a very good thing, particularly if you're an entrepreneur because it forces you to unwind. Way to many people don't understand how toxic living and breathing your work can actually be. I speak from experience having worked from a "home office" for 7-8 years. I recently went back to a separate office, it's been a freaking blessing. And don't get me wrong, I was very productive at home -- I'm just more productive in the right ways now. Working at an office generally gives you more focus on what's really important.
    - thibaut_barrere 17y ago
      > That's because you had a terrible work environment That's the average work environment, in my experience :) > Working at an office generally gives you more focus on what's really important. I do work from home but with a specific (and very small) area as my office - I'm far more productive here than in the cubicles I used to work.
      - pxlpshr 17y ago
        The average work environment is all relative. Maybe you should be a web developer for advertising agencies -- after all, print is dying. :)
        thibaut_barrere 17y ago
        You're right in that I'm not a web developer for advertising agencies anymore :) I did a quick experience for a small one, and surely I won't do that again.
- _delirium 17y ago
  I guess I don't see where it reduces the distractions. 90%+ of my distractions at home and at work are the same, involving the internet, getting up to make tea/coffee, getting lunch, etc. The office even adds new ones, like coworkers making smalltalk.
- cheald 17y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. I'm far more productive working at home than I was in an office, but I've also thrown the whole idea of a work schedule out the window. I have my to-do lists and my deadlines, but I work when my mind is sharp, and don't when it isn't. Sometimes this means I work for 45 minutes, sometimes this means I work for 16 hours. Having the freedom to stop working and go do something else when I hit a mental wall means that every minute I am working is far more productive. I can collapse a tremendous amount of work into far less calendar time, just because I don't have the 2-hours "shake off the rust" time in the morning, the 3 PM "Only 2 more hours to go, and boy do I need a nap" lull, and the "I've got 17 other things going on which ensure that I'm going to get nothing done today, but I'm going to be in this chair for 8 hours anyway" days. I've found that I actually work hours than I used to, at a higher productivity level than I used to. I am very motivated and passionate about what I do, which helps an awful lot. I don't think that everyone could do it, and I don't think it's the best possible solution, but it works better than anything else I've tried yet.
odonnell 17y ago
I listened to an episode of the 37signals Podcast where Jason mentioned that some days they all show up at the office but are forbidden to speak to each other for productivity reasons. Many of his business decisions are questionable, glad to see someone challenging them.
- arethuza 17y ago
  "all show up at the office but are forbidden to speak to each other for productivity reasons" Does that mean that they aren't allowed to bug each other about work related things (or schedule meetings etc.) or are they literally not allowed to talk to each other? I'm hoping it is the former!
- Judson 17y ago
  It may just be me, but I like that work fulfills that "getting out of the house" desire every once and a while.
  - access_denied 17y ago
    I am a work-from-home dude and that is the one thing that still 'sucks'. I try to do different stuff like biking or whatever, but I still miss the first hour at the office ('hello', 'what's up?' and 'coffee').
westbywest 17y ago
A proposal: employees will maintain respectable office hours (a la be physically present when senior mgmt is around) if you ditch the cubes and halt the perpetual musical chairs.
enjo 17y ago
ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) isn't about working from home, however. It's about supporting an environment that allows employees to nicely integrate their professional and personal lives in ways that work best for them. We have an office. We are a results oriented shop that measures our performance on results, not hours worked. While sometimes we might choose to work from home, we generally work in our office. My employees, however, have no mandate to actually be in the office at any specific time except for one Monday afternoon meeting a week (which you can call into if you really need to). I agree with the author, working from home isn't always a good idea. I'm not sure it's ever really a good idea actually. However, the flexibility for a parent to pick their kids up from school or take a day to go fishing to ponder a problem is huge. It results in happier employees, but also much more productive ones (at least in my experience stretching into teams of 50+). This extends to vacation days, btw. We have unlimited vacation days. I only ask that for extended vacations (more than a couple of days) that you work with me so that we can keep the project nicely staffed and scheduled. That caveat is, of course, that your meeting my high expectations for actually getting stuff done. In part because of the character of person we hire, that's never been an issue. I don't see why we have to confuse the two issues. Remote is not the same as flexible.
- Adaptive 17y ago
  Excellent comment. Most non-technical professional firms I've worked in evaluate performance solely on results. We book our own flights, we schedule our own meetings with clients, etc. In other words, the company expects us to be grown-ups and one either meets those expectations or ceases to be employed. I've also worked for companies that are obsessed with hours. The worst was a software firm that was focused on an increasingly complex set of "flexi-time" rules designed, on the surface, to allow flexible work hours while maintaining some common work time and also enforcing "fairness". In reality, I found that it was really just a way for managers to avoid having to deal with cracking down on lazy workers. Without the byzantine set of flexi-time rules they would have had to confront dead-wood employees and can them. The software firm was unsurprisingly filled with engineers with poor people skills that had become managers and were uncomfortable doing this. Hire carefully, have high expectations, make them clear, be goal and result oriented, check in often and communicate well, and fire people that don't get their work done. 100% agree with comment above. I've never, ever seen a functional, professional services company where working from home was the norm or even a good idea. It's just that, as an adult, it's sometimes the most useful, necessary, and responsible choice.
patio11 17y ago
If there are other one-man bands here, I'd appreciate hearing your experiences on this. I'm considering renting a room at my local tech incubator after going full-time, just to achieve mental separation of work and non-work: if I've biked over to "the office" I'm working, if I'm not at the office I'm not.
- apowell 17y ago
  I've only been a one-man band for about three months, but I have a separate room with doors that close set up as my home office. Big floating desk, ergonomic chair (Steelcase Leap), quality monitor -- and when I'm in here, it feels like work. If you have a room for a true home office -- not a corner in the living room, or a desk in the bedroom -- then I don't think incurring the overhead (expense or commuting time) of an outside office is worthwhile for a one-man band. On the other hand, if the incubator is cheap and filled with interesting people, I'd probably do it just for the opportunity to interact with others.
- Adaptive 17y ago
  When I work from home I get up like I'm "going" to work, put on decent clothes (no pj's) and don't screw around before sitting down to work. I keep a regular schedule just like I was working in situ.
  - marilyn 17y ago
    I totally agree. Real clothes is a really import step to a productive day.
- thibaut_barrere 17y ago
  I thought about this as well, but really on the long run the cost of renting a dedicated or shared office in my case was just not worth it. I currently do a mixed approach: whenever I feel I need to 'bike over' to achieve mental separation, I rent a place for the afternoon or the day in a co-working area, or I go to some library (sometimes without internet access, even better :-) Next year as I move to the countryside with my family, where place is really cheap compared to my current place (Paris/France) we'll keep a dedicated room for product development, and another room for servers/infrastructure (garage most likely).
_delirium 17y ago
Having the office hours be two hours a day every day, as opposed to, say, having two days a week of office-hour days, seems pretty inefficient from a commute perspective, unless everyone lives next door to your office. Part of the advantage of not having to go in every day is not having to commute there every day. I also personally find frequent interruptions in my ability to manage my own schedule pretty damaging. If I know I'm going to have to be somewhere 1-3pm on Wednesday, I will probably not get anything done Wednesday morning, either, in anticipation of being interrupted: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- Devilboy 17y ago
  I think the idea is that everyone still comes to work every day, but some people may want to start earlier and others later. On most days you'll still be in the office for 6 hours or whatever, but you have the flexibility to take a morning off for personal or whatever reasons without having to clear it with everyone.
  - Goladus 17y ago
    Right and I think that's an unfortunate way to approach the problem. "Everyone still comes to work every day" is really not that beneficial in the long run. "Everyone shares some core hours" definitely makes sense. If you spend 30 minutes commuting, that consumes an entire hour of time, arbitrarily splits two other potentially productive 2-hour blocks in half, and risks afflicting your emotional state with fear and anger that affect your work and interactions with others. If you make it 3 4-hour days rather than 5 2-hour days that means people have days where they can live their life free of a stressful commute altogether, and that is a huge win.
blhack 17y ago
Hmm...forgive me as I am not a professional coder, and only dream about working in this sort of an environment, but.. Wouldn't you want to go in to the office pretty often? If your goal is getting things done, and going to the office to meet with your team is the best way of realizing that goal, then wouldn't employees come in as needed naturally?
brandon272 17y ago
The post really seems to frown upon the "work at home" concept, so I was expecting that they had implemented something more substantial as far as office hour requirements than a small 2 hour window in the afternoon.
kimfuh 17y ago
I just make our office comfortable enough that everyone finds it hard to leave. A relaxed body and mind is a productive body and mind.
InclinedPlane 17y ago
Two points need to be made here, I think. First, for extremely talented, highly individually motivated people it's important that they have the flexibility of process to figure out what works best for them. Chances are that such folks will do good work pretty much regardless of any formal process, but working out a system that maximizes their productivity, reduces their stress, and increases their job satisfaction can be very important. Often these tend to be "non-traditional" systems or even unique solutions depending on the various traits of the individual, sometimes people have different ways of working. These are the sort of 99th percentile workers that would be running their own startup if they weren't working with you, they work because they love it and they are not just cogs they are artists, their work is creative and creative work often requires non-traditional work environments and hours. Second, for individuals with average talent and average individual motivation process tends to be more important. Indeed, process is often a critical element in the success or failure of teams that are primarily composed of average workers, whether developers or otherwise. Many of the non-traditional work environments and work rules that translate into success for 99th percentile workers will result in catastrophic failure when applied to groups composed mostly of average developers. This is what makes generic advice so difficult. Advice that applies to one group will frequently cause consternation and failure in the other. The advice of Jason Fried, coming from 37signals, often applies only to the first group. Both Jason's advice and this critique from MetaLab are perfectly valid but neither is suitable as blanket advice for every developer across all skill levels and in any organization. People need to first understand that there is no one-size-fits-all process that will maximize developer productivity in every situation and that different processes are necessary for different skill levels, personalities, and levels of individual motivation. Once that is understood then they can move forward towards figuring out what sorts of work environments and schedules work best for each individual.
- jzimdars 17y ago
  I've heard this argument before that it requires a certain type or caliber of employee to offer a flexible, results-based work environment. When trying to implement these policies in another company I was always told that "we don't have those kinds of people." I think if you treat people like they're "those kind of people" they may just start acting and producing like "those kind of people". Excessive accountability and other policies designed to maximize productivity often have the undesired effect of making people feel mistrusted. It is employees that feel like a part of something, whose efforts matter that do the best work. I love this quote from Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard: "If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1264458781-J%20GjSEysMw0LlzD3IYDSmQ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?pag...
cookiecaper 17y ago
I've thought about this issue a lot. I think that the ideal is to have an office with normal working hours and have the staff expected to generally meet those hours (within a couple of hours on the start and end time). However, with this, offer leniency on individual adhesion. For instance, if someone has an appointment during the day, or needs a half-day, or needs a whole day off, or whatever, and that person has no impending obligations that day, simply require a few minutes of notice and then let it slide without Nazi-tizing the operation. The workplace needs to be concerned with productivity, not draconian enforcement of arcane rulesets. Leniency with the schedule is fine as long as the employee is performing well. It is good to keep general office hours. Fried's approach as quoted here seems naive and reactionary to me; we've all worked at places where hours have received far too much emphasis, but the right solution isn't doing away with them completely because there's a lot of benefit for everyone involved (clients, company, employees) in having generally-followed hours. Generally-adhered-to office hours benefit everyone. It's good to have everyone in the same space. It fosters relationships, it results in collaborative creative spurts, not to mention the personal benefits of getting out of the house, "grown-up" time without distraction or the normal demands at home with the family, and so on. The right solution is compassionate enforcement and a focus on productivity and morale, not absolute compliance with pre-defined generalized rules. One of my old employers operated almost this way and it was totally awesome ... until the forward-thinking, ex-NSA programmer boss got supplanted by the business-school manufacturing executive. Almost the whole team followed the good boss out of the company.
erikstarck 17y ago
Just some random thoughts but for me personally I know that I work in bursts of inspiration. Sometimes it can go weeks between my periods of "flow". We all go through different phases of inspiration and flow and what works good in one phase doesn't necessarily work in another.
amadiver 17y ago
Jason Fried reminds me of Ken Lay of Enron. He needs to be grounded. I work from home. Coming into the office: after weeks and weeks, I develop a pattern. It's extremely different than my first week at work. My first week coming in to the office, I'm extremely punctual: I clock in at 10, and out at 6. I spend a good amount of my day interfacing with my Project Manager, talking to my fellow programmers, taking smoke breaks with them. Call of Duty, and NERF fights break out irregularly Working from home: after weeks and weeks, I develop a pattern. I wake up early, 6 or 7, and start in on work or go to the gym. I may have four hours of uninterrupted work time before work "officially" starts. Maximum efficiency without interruption. I can "come in to work early" - 3-4 hours early - without feeling like I'm being taken advantage of, because I may stop working earlier than normal work hours. I usually don't, though -- my typical work weeks clock in at over 50 hours, and I'm the better for it. I'm learning when other people are sleeping. I always ask my project manager and my director what's going on for the rest of the day to ensure I'm working when everyone else expects me to be. I have some flexibility in my schedule, and I try really hard to not abuse it. I give as much warning as I can that I'll be away from my computer. I took no days off from work last year except when I had to travel to SXSW because I was nominated for a web award and for when I had to have surgery/recovery for cancer. iChat or Skype with video can easily solve the body language issue. "Emoticons" as horrid as they are, are invaluable in communication. Exclamation points, too. As outside my comfortability zone as it is, this statement: "No problem kicking it out before Monday! :)" communicates my situation far better than "I can deliver by Monday" does. Really, I don't mind putting in a few more hours over the weekend to ensure the project launches, but there's no way to communicate that without facial expressions or emoticons, so abuse the shit out of both.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  Yeah. I think the difference here (you are similar to me, in some ways, but I prefer working "normal" hours at home) is that you (we) appreciate being able to work from home and invest the time and energy into making it work as well as possible for the client / company. That the employees in this post aren't doing that - or aren't perceived to be doing that - is worrying. But then isn't the author the same control freak guy who was micro-managaging in a previous post? I suspect there's a company culture centred around following the letter of his instructions rather than actually thinking.
sscheper 17y ago
I agree with this post.
abalashov 17y ago
Reminds me of this submission that I had made once upon a time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757407 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757407 - it's about the relationship of locales - and specifically, of changing them - to productivity. It understandably never got read or voted up due to its unappealing wall-of-text presentation, but I think it's an important angle on the issue.
marltod 17y ago
Good article, I WFH and I think my peak productivity would be if I was going into the office 1-3 days a week. One benefit to the employer he didn't mention is lower salary. I have had opportunities to move to jobs with 20% more pay but it hasn't been worth giving up the flexibility of my current job.
Goladus 17y ago
Whether there are a lot of distractions at home depends a lot on where you live and how you arrange your work-at-home environment. In my current apartment, there are definitely far fewer distractions, and I can cook myself a healthy lunch in about 15 minutes rather than spending money for crap from the cafeteria. When I work from home I don't work a 16 hour day. I work 8 to 6, in fact I often work more hours, am done earlier, and get more accomplished. I didn't have to waste any time or stress commuting, I got to make myself lunch and spend 30 minutes meditating in peace and quiet, and there was no background noise at all for the whole day. Instead of getting distracted by facebook, email, hacker news, and wikipedia I take a few minutes here and there to do house chores like laundry and sweeping. Those are the sort of long term efficiencies that make working from home so beneficial. The biggest thing I miss about the office, apart from being able to attend meetings when scheduled, is the reliable wired LAN. The VPN is much slower and using the web version if Outlook blows given the volume of email I deal with. Personally, I wouldn't want work from home more than one or two days per week, because being available for random walk-ups and face-to-face interaction with co-workers is an important part of the job. But when I need to tackle a technical problem that requires a lot of reading and a state of "flow" there are huge advantages to working from home.
Evgeny 17y ago
Actually most days I try to come to work 1 hour earlier than everyone else and spend this hour on some "self-development" tasks. I use to think that it is my lack of motivation/discipline, but in this 1 hour I can get more learning, studying etc. done, compared to the whole evening at home.
doki_pen 17y ago
When will people stop arguing about this? Stop projecting your own problems on me. I work great from home. Just because it doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it doesn't work for others. This seems like a pretty basic idea in life that people should be able to understand. It doesn't mean my cocks bigger because I'm productive at home, it simply means that I work better from home.
aplusbi 17y ago
I had a job where the "core hours" were from noon to 5. Past that you had to work at least 8 hours a day. In practice this meant that everyone arrived at the office at noon. I thought the policy was pretty good but I don't think it worked out that well for me. It meant I was at the office until at least 8pm every day, usually later.
- imp 17y ago
  Could you have worked 9 - 5 or 10 - 6 if you wanted to? Or was there pressure to work when everyone else did?
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    There's a lot to be said for mandatory start times.

101 points by mikeyur 17y ago

I agree with this post 100%. Working from home mostly leads to working longer and less productive hours. You need to separate your work place from your living space. Does it not seem like a conflict of interest to anyone else that 37signals preaches the work-from-home lifestyle while selling remote collaboration tools?

odonnell 17y ago
How does that constitute a conflict of interest? They make software that they find useful.
- jfornear 17y ago
  It's not a conflict of interest per se. I think I just consciously try to ignore their blog because I feel like its purpose is to sucker you into buying their stuff.
  - euroclydon 17y ago
    If you find one that's not, let me know!
aasarava 17y ago
It depends on the individual. I've worked from home for the past three years and have never been more productive. When I was in an office, the constant interruptions by coworkers, the uncomfortable lighting, the uncomfortable seating, the false privacy of a cubicle, the endless meeting requests, the cooing over someone's new baby, the barking of someone's dog, the constant pressure to attend someone's birthday celebration in the kitchen or going-away party in the lobby or baby shower in the meeting room -- all of it kept me from doing my best work. My living space and work space are the same. But on most days, I'm out the bedroom door at 6pm and in talking to my wife and playing with my son in the kitchen at 6:01pm. Happiness and productivity are very tightly linked.
- pxlpshr 17y ago
  That's because you had a terrible work environment and you're honey mooning, not because working from an office is evil. Separating life and work is generally a very good thing, particularly if you're an entrepreneur because it forces you to unwind. Way to many people don't understand how toxic living and breathing your work can actually be. I speak from experience having worked from a "home office" for 7-8 years. I recently went back to a separate office, it's been a freaking blessing. And don't get me wrong, I was very productive at home -- I'm just more productive in the right ways now. Working at an office generally gives you more focus on what's really important.
  - thibaut_barrere 17y ago
    > That's because you had a terrible work environment That's the average work environment, in my experience :) > Working at an office generally gives you more focus on what's really important. I do work from home but with a specific (and very small) area as my office - I'm far more productive here than in the cubicles I used to work.
    - pxlpshr 17y ago
      The average work environment is all relative. Maybe you should be a web developer for advertising agencies -- after all, print is dying. :)
      - thibaut_barrere 17y ago
        You're right in that I'm not a web developer for advertising agencies anymore :) I did a quick experience for a small one, and surely I won't do that again.
_delirium 17y ago
I guess I don't see where it reduces the distractions. 90%+ of my distractions at home and at work are the same, involving the internet, getting up to make tea/coffee, getting lunch, etc. The office even adds new ones, like coworkers making smalltalk.
cheald 17y ago
I'm not sure I agree. I'm far more productive working at home than I was in an office, but I've also thrown the whole idea of a work schedule out the window. I have my to-do lists and my deadlines, but I work when my mind is sharp, and don't when it isn't. Sometimes this means I work for 45 minutes, sometimes this means I work for 16 hours. Having the freedom to stop working and go do something else when I hit a mental wall means that every minute I am working is far more productive. I can collapse a tremendous amount of work into far less calendar time, just because I don't have the 2-hours "shake off the rust" time in the morning, the 3 PM "Only 2 more hours to go, and boy do I need a nap" lull, and the "I've got 17 other things going on which ensure that I'm going to get nothing done today, but I'm going to be in this chair for 8 hours anyway" days. I've found that I actually work hours than I used to, at a higher productivity level than I used to. I am very motivated and passionate about what I do, which helps an awful lot. I don't think that everyone could do it, and I don't think it's the best possible solution, but it works better than anything else I've tried yet.

odonnell 17y ago

I listened to an episode of the 37signals Podcast where Jason mentioned that some days they all show up at the office but are forbidden to speak to each other for productivity reasons. Many of his business decisions are questionable, glad to see someone challenging them.

arethuza 17y ago
"all show up at the office but are forbidden to speak to each other for productivity reasons" Does that mean that they aren't allowed to bug each other about work related things (or schedule meetings etc.) or are they literally not allowed to talk to each other? I'm hoping it is the former!
Judson 17y ago
It may just be me, but I like that work fulfills that "getting out of the house" desire every once and a while.
- access_denied 17y ago
  I am a work-from-home dude and that is the one thing that still 'sucks'. I try to do different stuff like biking or whatever, but I still miss the first hour at the office ('hello', 'what's up?' and 'coffee').

westbywest 17y ago

A proposal: employees will maintain respectable office hours (a la be physically present when senior mgmt is around) if you ditch the cubes and halt the perpetual musical chairs.

enjo 17y ago

ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) isn't about working from home, however. It's about supporting an environment that allows employees to nicely integrate their professional and personal lives in ways that work best for them. We have an office. We are a results oriented shop that measures our performance on results, not hours worked. While sometimes we might choose to work from home, we generally work in our office. My employees, however, have no mandate to actually be in the office at any specific time except for one Monday afternoon meeting a week (which you can call into if you really need to). I agree with the author, working from home isn't always a good idea. I'm not sure it's ever really a good idea actually. However, the flexibility for a parent to pick their kids up from school or take a day to go fishing to ponder a problem is huge. It results in happier employees, but also much more productive ones (at least in my experience stretching into teams of 50+). This extends to vacation days, btw. We have unlimited vacation days. I only ask that for extended vacations (more than a couple of days) that you work with me so that we can keep the project nicely staffed and scheduled. That caveat is, of course, that your meeting my high expectations for actually getting stuff done. In part because of the character of person we hire, that's never been an issue. I don't see why we have to confuse the two issues. Remote is not the same as flexible.

Adaptive 17y ago
Excellent comment. Most non-technical professional firms I've worked in evaluate performance solely on results. We book our own flights, we schedule our own meetings with clients, etc. In other words, the company expects us to be grown-ups and one either meets those expectations or ceases to be employed. I've also worked for companies that are obsessed with hours. The worst was a software firm that was focused on an increasingly complex set of "flexi-time" rules designed, on the surface, to allow flexible work hours while maintaining some common work time and also enforcing "fairness". In reality, I found that it was really just a way for managers to avoid having to deal with cracking down on lazy workers. Without the byzantine set of flexi-time rules they would have had to confront dead-wood employees and can them. The software firm was unsurprisingly filled with engineers with poor people skills that had become managers and were uncomfortable doing this. Hire carefully, have high expectations, make them clear, be goal and result oriented, check in often and communicate well, and fire people that don't get their work done. 100% agree with comment above. I've never, ever seen a functional, professional services company where working from home was the norm or even a good idea. It's just that, as an adult, it's sometimes the most useful, necessary, and responsible choice.

patio11 17y ago

If there are other one-man bands here, I'd appreciate hearing your experiences on this. I'm considering renting a room at my local tech incubator after going full-time, just to achieve mental separation of work and non-work: if I've biked over to "the office" I'm working, if I'm not at the office I'm not.

apowell 17y ago
I've only been a one-man band for about three months, but I have a separate room with doors that close set up as my home office. Big floating desk, ergonomic chair (Steelcase Leap), quality monitor -- and when I'm in here, it feels like work. If you have a room for a true home office -- not a corner in the living room, or a desk in the bedroom -- then I don't think incurring the overhead (expense or commuting time) of an outside office is worthwhile for a one-man band. On the other hand, if the incubator is cheap and filled with interesting people, I'd probably do it just for the opportunity to interact with others.
Adaptive 17y ago
When I work from home I get up like I'm "going" to work, put on decent clothes (no pj's) and don't screw around before sitting down to work. I keep a regular schedule just like I was working in situ.
- marilyn 17y ago
  I totally agree. Real clothes is a really import step to a productive day.
thibaut_barrere 17y ago
I thought about this as well, but really on the long run the cost of renting a dedicated or shared office in my case was just not worth it. I currently do a mixed approach: whenever I feel I need to 'bike over' to achieve mental separation, I rent a place for the afternoon or the day in a co-working area, or I go to some library (sometimes without internet access, even better :-) Next year as I move to the countryside with my family, where place is really cheap compared to my current place (Paris/France) we'll keep a dedicated room for product development, and another room for servers/infrastructure (garage most likely).

_delirium 17y ago

Having the office hours be two hours a day every day, as opposed to, say, having two days a week of office-hour days, seems pretty inefficient from a commute perspective, unless everyone lives next door to your office. Part of the advantage of not having to go in every day is not having to commute there every day. I also personally find frequent interruptions in my ability to manage my own schedule pretty damaging. If I know I'm going to have to be somewhere 1-3pm on Wednesday, I will probably not get anything done Wednesday morning, either, in anticipation of being interrupted: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Devilboy 17y ago
I think the idea is that everyone still comes to work every day, but some people may want to start earlier and others later. On most days you'll still be in the office for 6 hours or whatever, but you have the flexibility to take a morning off for personal or whatever reasons without having to clear it with everyone.
- Goladus 17y ago
  Right and I think that's an unfortunate way to approach the problem. "Everyone still comes to work every day" is really not that beneficial in the long run. "Everyone shares some core hours" definitely makes sense. If you spend 30 minutes commuting, that consumes an entire hour of time, arbitrarily splits two other potentially productive 2-hour blocks in half, and risks afflicting your emotional state with fear and anger that affect your work and interactions with others. If you make it 3 4-hour days rather than 5 2-hour days that means people have days where they can live their life free of a stressful commute altogether, and that is a huge win.

blhack 17y ago

Hmm...forgive me as I am not a professional coder, and only dream about working in this sort of an environment, but.. Wouldn't you want to go in to the office pretty often? If your goal is getting things done, and going to the office to meet with your team is the best way of realizing that goal, then wouldn't employees come in as needed naturally?

brandon272 17y ago

The post really seems to frown upon the "work at home" concept, so I was expecting that they had implemented something more substantial as far as office hour requirements than a small 2 hour window in the afternoon.

kimfuh 17y ago

I just make our office comfortable enough that everyone finds it hard to leave. A relaxed body and mind is a productive body and mind.

InclinedPlane 17y ago

Two points need to be made here, I think. First, for extremely talented, highly individually motivated people it's important that they have the flexibility of process to figure out what works best for them. Chances are that such folks will do good work pretty much regardless of any formal process, but working out a system that maximizes their productivity, reduces their stress, and increases their job satisfaction can be very important. Often these tend to be "non-traditional" systems or even unique solutions depending on the various traits of the individual, sometimes people have different ways of working. These are the sort of 99th percentile workers that would be running their own startup if they weren't working with you, they work because they love it and they are not just cogs they are artists, their work is creative and creative work often requires non-traditional work environments and hours. Second, for individuals with average talent and average individual motivation process tends to be more important. Indeed, process is often a critical element in the success or failure of teams that are primarily composed of average workers, whether developers or otherwise. Many of the non-traditional work environments and work rules that translate into success for 99th percentile workers will result in catastrophic failure when applied to groups composed mostly of average developers. This is what makes generic advice so difficult. Advice that applies to one group will frequently cause consternation and failure in the other. The advice of Jason Fried, coming from 37signals, often applies only to the first group. Both Jason's advice and this critique from MetaLab are perfectly valid but neither is suitable as blanket advice for every developer across all skill levels and in any organization. People need to first understand that there is no one-size-fits-all process that will maximize developer productivity in every situation and that different processes are necessary for different skill levels, personalities, and levels of individual motivation. Once that is understood then they can move forward towards figuring out what sorts of work environments and schedules work best for each individual.

jzimdars 17y ago
I've heard this argument before that it requires a certain type or caliber of employee to offer a flexible, results-based work environment. When trying to implement these policies in another company I was always told that "we don't have those kinds of people." I think if you treat people like they're "those kind of people" they may just start acting and producing like "those kind of people". Excessive accountability and other policies designed to maximize productivity often have the undesired effect of making people feel mistrusted. It is employees that feel like a part of something, whose efforts matter that do the best work. I love this quote from Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard: "If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1264458781-J%20GjSEysMw0LlzD3IYDSmQ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?pag...

cookiecaper 17y ago

I've thought about this issue a lot. I think that the ideal is to have an office with normal working hours and have the staff expected to generally meet those hours (within a couple of hours on the start and end time). However, with this, offer leniency on individual adhesion. For instance, if someone has an appointment during the day, or needs a half-day, or needs a whole day off, or whatever, and that person has no impending obligations that day, simply require a few minutes of notice and then let it slide without Nazi-tizing the operation. The workplace needs to be concerned with productivity, not draconian enforcement of arcane rulesets. Leniency with the schedule is fine as long as the employee is performing well. It is good to keep general office hours. Fried's approach as quoted here seems naive and reactionary to me; we've all worked at places where hours have received far too much emphasis, but the right solution isn't doing away with them completely because there's a lot of benefit for everyone involved (clients, company, employees) in having generally-followed hours. Generally-adhered-to office hours benefit everyone. It's good to have everyone in the same space. It fosters relationships, it results in collaborative creative spurts, not to mention the personal benefits of getting out of the house, "grown-up" time without distraction or the normal demands at home with the family, and so on. The right solution is compassionate enforcement and a focus on productivity and morale, not absolute compliance with pre-defined generalized rules. One of my old employers operated almost this way and it was totally awesome ... until the forward-thinking, ex-NSA programmer boss got supplanted by the business-school manufacturing executive. Almost the whole team followed the good boss out of the company.

erikstarck 17y ago

Just some random thoughts but for me personally I know that I work in bursts of inspiration. Sometimes it can go weeks between my periods of "flow". We all go through different phases of inspiration and flow and what works good in one phase doesn't necessarily work in another.

amadiver 17y ago

Jason Fried reminds me of Ken Lay of Enron. He needs to be grounded. I work from home. Coming into the office: after weeks and weeks, I develop a pattern. It's extremely different than my first week at work. My first week coming in to the office, I'm extremely punctual: I clock in at 10, and out at 6. I spend a good amount of my day interfacing with my Project Manager, talking to my fellow programmers, taking smoke breaks with them. Call of Duty, and NERF fights break out irregularly Working from home: after weeks and weeks, I develop a pattern. I wake up early, 6 or 7, and start in on work or go to the gym. I may have four hours of uninterrupted work time before work "officially" starts. Maximum efficiency without interruption. I can "come in to work early" - 3-4 hours early - without feeling like I'm being taken advantage of, because I may stop working earlier than normal work hours. I usually don't, though -- my typical work weeks clock in at over 50 hours, and I'm the better for it. I'm learning when other people are sleeping. I always ask my project manager and my director what's going on for the rest of the day to ensure I'm working when everyone else expects me to be. I have some flexibility in my schedule, and I try really hard to not abuse it. I give as much warning as I can that I'll be away from my computer. I took no days off from work last year except when I had to travel to SXSW because I was nominated for a web award and for when I had to have surgery/recovery for cancer. iChat or Skype with video can easily solve the body language issue. "Emoticons" as horrid as they are, are invaluable in communication. Exclamation points, too. As outside my comfortability zone as it is, this statement: "No problem kicking it out before Monday! :)" communicates my situation far better than "I can deliver by Monday" does. Really, I don't mind putting in a few more hours over the weekend to ensure the project launches, but there's no way to communicate that without facial expressions or emoticons, so abuse the shit out of both.

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andrewcooke 17y ago
Yeah. I think the difference here (you are similar to me, in some ways, but I prefer working "normal" hours at home) is that you (we) appreciate being able to work from home and invest the time and energy into making it work as well as possible for the client / company. That the employees in this post aren't doing that - or aren't perceived to be doing that - is worrying. But then isn't the author the same control freak guy who was micro-managaging in a previous post? I suspect there's a company culture centred around following the letter of his instructions rather than actually thinking.

sscheper 17y ago

I agree with this post.

abalashov 17y ago

Reminds me of this submission that I had made once upon a time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757407 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757407 - it's about the relationship of locales - and specifically, of changing them - to productivity. It understandably never got read or voted up due to its unappealing wall-of-text presentation, but I think it's an important angle on the issue.

marltod 17y ago

Good article, I WFH and I think my peak productivity would be if I was going into the office 1-3 days a week. One benefit to the employer he didn't mention is lower salary. I have had opportunities to move to jobs with 20% more pay but it hasn't been worth giving up the flexibility of my current job.

Goladus 17y ago

Whether there are a lot of distractions at home depends a lot on where you live and how you arrange your work-at-home environment. In my current apartment, there are definitely far fewer distractions, and I can cook myself a healthy lunch in about 15 minutes rather than spending money for crap from the cafeteria. When I work from home I don't work a 16 hour day. I work 8 to 6, in fact I often work more hours, am done earlier, and get more accomplished. I didn't have to waste any time or stress commuting, I got to make myself lunch and spend 30 minutes meditating in peace and quiet, and there was no background noise at all for the whole day. Instead of getting distracted by facebook, email, hacker news, and wikipedia I take a few minutes here and there to do house chores like laundry and sweeping. Those are the sort of long term efficiencies that make working from home so beneficial. The biggest thing I miss about the office, apart from being able to attend meetings when scheduled, is the reliable wired LAN. The VPN is much slower and using the web version if Outlook blows given the volume of email I deal with. Personally, I wouldn't want work from home more than one or two days per week, because being available for random walk-ups and face-to-face interaction with co-workers is an important part of the job. But when I need to tackle a technical problem that requires a lot of reading and a state of "flow" there are huge advantages to working from home.

Evgeny 17y ago

Actually most days I try to come to work 1 hour earlier than everyone else and spend this hour on some "self-development" tasks. I use to think that it is my lack of motivation/discipline, but in this 1 hour I can get more learning, studying etc. done, compared to the whole evening at home.

doki_pen 17y ago

When will people stop arguing about this? Stop projecting your own problems on me. I work great from home. Just because it doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it doesn't work for others. This seems like a pretty basic idea in life that people should be able to understand. It doesn't mean my cocks bigger because I'm productive at home, it simply means that I work better from home.

aplusbi 17y ago

I had a job where the "core hours" were from noon to 5. Past that you had to work at least 8 hours a day. In practice this meant that everyone arrived at the office at noon. I thought the policy was pretty good but I don't think it worked out that well for me. It meant I was at the office until at least 8pm every day, usually later.

imp 17y ago
Could you have worked 9 - 5 or 10 - 6 if you wanted to? Or was there pressure to work when everyone else did?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  There's a lot to be said for mandatory start times.