9 ms·
A firm that starts work at 9.06am
- tapan_k 10y agoI joined the software industry after getting tired of all the [sometimes seemingly mindless] rigours of the construction industry that I worked for at the time. I wanted freedom, such as work anywhere anytime. Now, the pendulum has swung too far on the other side and I again long for some ritual that will help me maintain sanity. Reading this article convinces me that some ritual is still possible in the tech industry and I feel like working for this company.
- singingfish 10y agoHow does that work for me? I like to start at 7:30am. By 9:06 my productivity is starting to peak for the day. Yes, I knock off early too.
- Nadya 10y agoI imagine there can be exceptions. The rules are meant for productivity - if someone is more productive on a slightly different schedule I imagine they'd be for it, assuming their actual motivations are honest with their claims. I'm the only one at my company who comes in several hours before opening hours. I also leave several hours before closing. I made a personal request for this and my company obliged. Ironically, I'm writing this nearing midnight on a Sunday...from work. E: @ezl I'm pretty sure the point of the parent's question was an implied: "If I was an employee there, how would this work for [people like] me?"
- jacalata 10y agoI'm pretty sure ezl's answer implied "it wouldn't, and so you shouldn't work there"
- ezl 10y agoit doesn't. companies don't need a system that works for everyone. they need a system that works for their employees.
- ohwaitnvm 10y agoPivotal has nearly 100% of developer time spent pairing. This requires entire teams to be in sync on in/out and lunch schedules, else there will be non-pairing time. That's not the end of the world, but most teams don't have code review, favoring the live review of paired development. While at Pivotal, I did observe the rare team with an 8AM start instead of 9, but as far as I know everyone opted into being on an alternative schedule, and it was for out-of-time-zone client work to enable better communication with the client.
- systemtest 10y agoSimilar for me. My energy buildup starts at 12:00 and peaks at around 19:00-20:00 so I start as late as possible and try to put as much meetings as possible in the morning.
- beejiu 10y agoMaybe it doesn't have to work for you? It's a team sport.
- gaius 10y agoThis isn't the military, there is no higher purpose or mission. This is about shareholder value. Why sacrifice yourself for some shareholders you've never met in a one-sided deal, when you can just go work for someone who is willing to meet you halfway?
- beejiu 10y agoThat's my point: go work somewhere else. You can't work in a team that does pair programming and choose to work at different times. It's about culture match. If you don't fit the team, don't expect the team to fit you.
- chewyfruitloop 10y agothat early is fine if you don't have kids... or have kids who start school at some stupid time like 7am.... my kids don't start school until 8:50... so starting before 9 is completely unrealistic unless i get a massive pay rise to cover child care for 2 kids before school 5 days a week
- singingfish 10y agoIt used to be fine when I was 100% remote ;). These days the kids are a bit older and I like to be home earlier to be able to hang out with them in the afternevening.
- UK-AL 10y agoThe simple answer is don't work there.
- cyberferret 10y agoAll Government departments in my city start at 08:00 and finish at 16:21 !! No weirdness about the finishing time though - it is just so that the fortnightly pay run ends on an even hourly number. UPDATE: It seems that nearly all state and federal public services in Australia have strange knock off times... [0] [0] - http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2014/06/industrial-action-for-being-asked-to-work-9-to-5.html http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2014/06/industrial-action-fo...
- nisse72 10y ago> so that the fortnightly pay run ends on an even hourly number How isn't that already the case with 10 x 8 hour days? or 8.5 etc? Your linked article mentions another interesting idea: that an additional 9 minutes a day is more than 5 days a year. I used to work for a medium sized company (~500 staff) that made us all work 10 extra minutes each day "off the clock", but then gave it back in the form of a number of whole and half days throughout the year when the company would be closed for business. Usually that meant that we'd get an extra day off before a long weekend or bank holiday, an additional day before christmas, that sort of thing. This was on top of 33 days of paid annual leave, so a sweet deal.
- cyberferret 10y agoMy bad - It is not to make an even hour at the end of the fortnight. I asked a public service friend of mine and he said because there was an odd number of hours that our public servants had to work per fortnight (as the article I posted also pointed out). I assume it all works out evenly over 365.25 days or something? I've never worked in the public service, so cannot speak for their methods.
- iamshs 10y agoVictorian countryside government offices finish at 5:06 pm. It is due to 36.8 hours work week. Absolutely strange.
- jacques_chester 10y agoAnother Darwinite, I presume? "Fourtwennyone" is more than a contract, it's a cultural institution.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ohwaitnvm 10y agoI used to work at Pivotal and have many friends still there. The 9:06 and reasons here are correct. The line "Then the firm's programmers hit their computers, with no other meetings or distractions for the rest of the day," is absolute rubbish. Most teams have at least an Iteration Planning Meeting and a Retrospective each week, as well as generally a team-specific standup the majority of (if not all) days. As well, there are of course manager 1 on 1s, the rare company meeting, and ad-hoc meetings as a project sees fit. Sorry, I just had to comment because the quoted line is absurd. Edit: and the line about leaving work 6pm sharp is just as ridiculous. In the consulting side it tends to be true that your workday is over at 6 PM, but you're not going to get shoved into an elevator before you finish your commit message at 6:01. The limit is there so you don't overwork and so that the client companies know they can't push their consultants arbitrarily late.
- jacques_chester 10y agoI would've made this comment, maybe with a different tone. IPM and Retro last strictly one hour. Team standup might be 10 minutes. 1-on-1s might be every 3-4 weeks, length varying 30 minutes to an hour. Ad hoc meetings are rare. Usually introduced reluctantly and dropped as soon as possible. Missing from your list are the additional meetings an anchor takes on -- pre-IPM (if that's thought to be necessary), CL/LL checkin (length and frequency vary), Labs Project Status meeting (30 mins on Friday). Cloud R&D Pivots also attend a weekly joint standup. Sometimes global, sometimes local, length varies 10-20 minutes. And, of course, if you're a manager, you will be having 1-on-1s with some Pivots every week. But for the most part, it is possible for engineering pairs to be heads-down and working for hours on end. Edit: should mention I work for Pivotal. I'm actually off to get ready for work. Anyone who wants to ask me questions is free to hit me up, email is in my profile.
- donw 10y agoAlso worked at Pivotal, and this is definitely true. The number of meetings is must lower than in other firms (in my experience), but meetings are still a part of life. Breakfast, though, is such an amazing operational hack that I'm surprised the article didn't go into more detail. Humans are very rhythmic creatures, and our circadian rhythms are moderated a number of environmental factors -- the big two being sunlight, and food. By having both breakfast and lunch happen at the same time each day, your body adjusts to getting at least two meals on a regular schedule, which helps with maintaining a constant energy level throughout the day. On top of that, it makes it physiologically more difficult to be late to work. Your body knows that a meal is coming up and you will tend to wake up on time. And while, yeah, you don't leave at 6:01, it's pretty rare to see people at the office after about 6:30. So, it's pretty easy to get to sleep at a consistent time as well. This is important enough that it's part of one of my conference talks: that a regular cadence throughout the day, including set meal times, is a great way to boost happiness, improve health, and more importantly, get more "quality hours" out of the day.
- matthewrudy 10y agoI am quite surprised that the BBC ran this piece, which seems to be an advert for Pivotal. I guess this is just how PR works, but again, the BBC is supposed to be neutral in promoting individual businesses.
- charlieegan3 10y agoThe BBC is far from neutral. I think it's pretty dangerous to believe that they might be able to neutrally report the news (even if they wanted to).
- crdoconnor 10y agoA few years ago they laid off a whole bunch of journalists. Often they just don't have much time to write their own stories. The institution is a shadow of what it used to be 10 years ago. It used to hold the government to account. Now it's more like a British RT with added clickbait.
- gaius 10y agoWell, the BBC is unlike any other news organization, culturally - it is more like a branch of the Civil Service. If you showed up for an interview there as a tech journalist and you actually knew the difference between say Java and C++ because you'd used them both, then you're "just not our sort old chap". But show up wearing the right old school tie, conjugate a few Latin verbs, and spend the interview reminiscing about the good old days punting at Oxford and you're in. So the whole place is stuffed with people who fundamentally can't evaluate whatever they're told by any outsider - not even which outsiders are really experts or not.
- matt4077 10y agoJudging by the upvotes it's getting here, people are interested in it. The fact that it may be in Pivotal's interest for the article to be published should have no effect on the BBC's decision-making process – the same as it is with critical articles.
- jacques_chester 10y agoThere have been a few articles like this, I presume we have PR folk shopping us around to journos. In some ways, the "gee whiz" and "look how quirky!" stuff is highlighted because it's a novelty. That's how you get press: you do something different in a way that can be understood by others. Cutting through to the essence of anything takes time and practice, which a reporter doesn't have. For example: is Google all about free food? Of course not. Is Valve entirely their desks? No. Individual practices aren't Pivotal. Individuals are.
- thro32 10y ago> all have to be at work and ready to go at exactly 9.06am. > everyone has to leave the office at 6pm sharp because staff aren't allowed to work into the evening. I worked for similar company before. It was toxic environment.
- chewyfruitloop 10y agonothing motivates people like having their exact hours monitored
- manojlds 10y ago> Employees at the US firm's 20 global offices all have to be at work and ready to go at exactly 9.06am How is it 9.06am for everyone globally? Are they talking about each location's separate stand-up?
- jacques_chester 10y agoIt's a poorly-worded sentence. Each location starts at 9.06am local time. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal.
- vcool07 10y agoI dont understand why people hate meetings so much. Meetings are bad only if you are mentally absent in it. If you "decide" to actively participate you can soak in so much of knowledge in such short time. There was times at the beginning of my career when I used to sneak into adhoc meetings of senior tech guys in my team, and got away with quite a lot of info (including some odd stares and "yes, you want anything"? as well !)
- Matthias247 10y agoMeetings are ok if they have a clear agenda, a goal what should be decided in the meeting and a small focused group of attendants. If all this is true meetings can be very helpful to get some decisions or a better common understanding for a project. However often meetings are called in without a real goal - just for the sake of having a meeting. Or a large group of people is invited which don't necessarily contribute to the outcome. If any of those are true the meetings can feel like a giant waste of time for the participants. If people feel they are in a waste-of-time meeting they start working on other things in it, e.g. replying to email, .... This makes the attendant group even less focused and the decreases the outcome even more. These kind of meetings often happened to me in bigger projects in corporate environments, where there were weekly meetings scheduled for almost everything.
- vcool07 10y agoI'm in a lead role now, and I tried my best to do away with meetings keeping in line the general resentment for meetings among the devs. But, I often see that it's counter productive for the team as a whole in the long run. Without meetings, cross functional discussions screeched to an almost halt, most guys would get deep into their silos not caring about the big picture etc etc. Also, it was a huge pain keeping track of open tickets/tasks as most fail to update progress on a regular basis. In short, I feel, having periodical meetings is far better in the long run for the health of the team as a whole, at-least in practice.
- douche 10y agoI dislike meetings because they are wildly unproductive most of the time. The vast majority of the time, you could just send a couple emails, rather than disrupting everyone for a half-hour meeting. Also meetings generate a lot of false urgency and stress, which is counter-productive.
- andrewingram 10y agoWhenever companies i've worked for have provided breakfast, i've always abstained. I only eat breakfast if i'm going to the gym before work, in which case I eat beforehand. Otherwise I wait until lunch (around 12:30). So it always seems strange when companies offer it as an incentive to get in by a certain time.
- dolzenko 10y ago> So we thought, 'let's provide breakfast for everyone.' It gives them a reason to get here. Oh well...
- 0xmohit 10y agoWhy do they all show a text editor containing either JS or PHP code? Curious, honestly.
- crashdown 10y agoStock image... Do a reverse google image search on it and you'll find lots of articles using it.
- nl 10y agoHaving done some shots similar to this... You have code on the screen. Someone goes: "is that confidential/does it disclose a client/does it disclose any operational security issues/does it have too many swear words" so you go through it all and check. I don't think I've ever found an issue, but.... you have to check. So you do it. Then they do another shot. So you do it again. Then by the third time you start going "can you use that shot you took last time"?
- toomanybeersies 10y agoThey're Getty images stock photos. BBCs human interest articles are full of them.
- raverbashing 10y agoAnd free Kool-Aid in the kitchen apparently, apart from breakfast Whenever I read some piece about this company advertising its "qualities" I can't help but to turn my eyes And don't get me wrong, agile is great, pair programming is great, free breakfast sign me up The real question is what do you lose when you put the process before the people. (Oh wait I remember reading something about this somewhere)
- jacques_chester 10y agoI work for Pivotal. The koolaid is unexpectedly delicious. I've never worked for an employer that cared more about me as an individual.
- UK-AL 10y agoI think this is bs. Everyone has their own unique sleep cycle. Different people have different peaks. Again another company running with Agile keyword, keeping all the stuff about about control, and removing all the stuff about autonomy. This basically treating programmers like infants, ignoring the fact there a lot programmers have responsibilities around work like kids. Not everyone is a 22 yo developer.
- chewyfruitloop 10y agoi think your right... sounds like absolute bs brewed in the finest dung pile of clock watching excel pushing loonies. everyone can be autonomous when we tell them they can be, and only then.... I don't start until 9:30 and work until 6... with a bit of flexibility on the end of the day.....people don't care as long as my hours are done
- jacques_chester 10y agoI work for Pivotal. I understand why you could take that interpretation, but it's not the way the place works at all. If I need to leave early, I leave early. If I need to come late, I come late. If I need to go out during the day, I go out during the day. What I can't do during those hours is work.
- UK-AL 10y agoOk, why does the article say if you miss the Scrum meeting at 9:06, your absence will be noted? Will my absence be noted everyday, since I come in at 9:30 everyday?
- jacques_chester 10y agoI don't see where in the article the "absence is noted". I come in late each Friday because of a regular appointment. I tell my colleagues that I will be in late because it seems like the courteous thing to do. We're not a scrum shop. XP with Lean trimmings. Which we constantly tinker with. In the long run, the process is built on co-location and pairing. Of these, we'll take pairing. Which only really works if everyone is present at the same time: if you create and dissolve pairs as the number of engineers fluctuates, then you create a really confusing fan-out/fan-in effect on the work in flight. I worked on a project where were spread across two timezones, which simulated people coming at different times. We'd be 2 pairs, 4 pairs, then 2 pairs. It was a carwreck.
- draw_down 10y agoYuck.
- katpas 10y agoThis approach assumes people don't know how they work best so imposes a structure on them that limits the hours worked, makes sure people are fed etc. I would have thought developers are more likely to have put a lot of thought into how they're most productive. It's a bit patronising imposing something different on people who feel they've figured it out.
- jacques_chester 10y agoI work for Pivotal. It's not really an imposition. Many engineers like flexible hours and prefer to work for companies who like that. Since we pair full time, it's not practical to have flexible start or finish times. If anything, the "imposition" is committing to pair programming. Many folk don't like it, or don't like the idea of it, and never apply.
- UK-AL 10y agoI think imposing pair programming 100% is a bit weird. I find pair programming is excellent for some tasks. For simple tasks it's a hindrance.
- jacques_chester 10y agoThere are some tasks where soloing is unambiguously better (reading docs springs to mind) or where pairing confers very little advantage (writing a large draft). Lots of people don't like the idea of pairing by default. I was skeptical about its utility, except as a way to learn. But these days I find that I don't want to solo if I can help it. On days when I'm soloing I have to use more ritalin to manage my ADHD than on days when I'm pairing.
- barrkel 10y agoI find I have no time to think when I'm pairing. I tend to build experimental abstractions and chop and change them quickly to best fit with the problem, and vocalising what I'm trying to do slows me down 10x - not just is it tedious to explain the bigger picture I have in my mind about the change I'm performing, but while vocalising I don't have time to think further. And when I'm not at the keyboard, the slowness of my pair and the inelegance of their code - it's hard to formulate the right nudges or wait for their cogs to spin and realise the issues with their approach. I'd love to work with better programmers, but they're hard to find.
- cdevs 10y agoThey still haven't figured out our pattern of "if you keep me out of a meeting about my project that's the day I'm taking a hour lunch during your hour meeting". So either invite me to the meeting about my project or I'm taking lunch because if you think I'm going to pound away on a keyboard while you learn what to come back and tell me out of context then your wrong.
- mattbee 10y agoFor an article that is about the precise time of 9.06am, why use an illustration of a wall-clock that is 18 seconds late? Is it a coded message?