7 ms·

...if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not? Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that mornin

...if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not? Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that. I once saw a workplace where there were night-person-friendly policies and schedules. Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid, and all night-person preferences had to be fought for and justified. So if you want to reach a world with truly optimal flexible schedules, first you'll need to wrest ownership of the culture from the "morning people are better" people who currently dominate it.

dictum 9y ago
> Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? It's as hard for the morning person to deal with night-person preferences as it's hard for a night person to deal with morning-person preferences. (Disclaimer: I'm a morning person and I'm not American.)
- davehtaylor 9y ago
  I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    It's the Ben Franklin Poor Richard's Almanac thing: "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He was also the buttmunch that gave us daylight savings time.
    - core-questions 9y ago
      I used to be really against DST, but honestly, it's the only thing that actually lets me see the damn sun at all in the winter, so now I'm a fan.
      - krylon 9y ago
        But DST is in summer, isn't it? At least that is what I have been told: In summer, days are so long and start so early that we might as well move the whole day back by an hour, so get up early, finish work early and still have a couple of hours of daylight left. Full disclosure: I am not a fan of DST, but I do not expect the current situation to change. In Europe, almost(?) all countries use it, so if just Germany (where I live) abolished DST, we would be out of sync with the rest of Europe for half of the year. Dealing with dates and times as a programmer is already confusing enough; if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain. And I do not see that happening anytime soon.
        surement 9y ago
        > if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain There are already countless exceptions to DST and people seem to be doing fine. E.g. in Australia there are two regions in the same time zone where only one has DST, meaning they are out of sync for half the year.
        lazyasciiart 9y ago
        It's a source of constant complaints, massive costs and is totally bloody stupid, assuming you're talking about the NSW/QLD border.
        khedoros1 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/File:DST_Countries_Map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi... In areas that are arguably Europe, it looks like Iceland, Kaliningrad Oblast, and Belarus are the places that stick out. I'm in California; most of Arizona is permanently in daylight savings, and we work with a lot of developers in China and India, which don't observe it. It certainly complicates things, sometimes. I've done work on my product's logging subsystem before, and especially bugs with recorded times. Dealing with different DST rules is a mess.
  - jrs235 9y ago
    Perhaps "morning person" is the default because many people have families and children and whether or not they operate best in the morning or evening, they are forced to operate in the morning because that's when school time is scheduled (the children are at school) and the children are home in the evening (default family time). I'm wishing that someday we can get to more flexible schooling hours. I think if we want to change the "morning default position" then we need to address schooling defaults.
    - davehtaylor 9y ago
      Schooling is definitely a major issue. My nephew has to be at school by 7:15 am. It’s absolutley asinine to believe that pre-teens and teens can be functional or able to actually learn anything at such an hour. Not to mention the fact that every school is different. His younger brother, for example doesn’t start school until nearl 9:00. And this is an elementary and a high school in the same district. It’s insane. So their mom has to figure out how to get them to school a vastly different times, then figure out how to make it to work at a reasonable time given her schedule. I definitely agree that this is a major issue that we need to address.
      - finnh 9y ago
        This is slowly changing. Here in Seattle we just went through a major shift where (most) public elementary schools start early, and the middle/highschool kids shift later.
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    But morning really is the default; it's our biological default. Most people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night naturally. Many people have small children, good luck remaining a night person with a 1 year old in the house. There are real reasons here, it's not just some arbitrary decision.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      Biologically, don't most people wake up at dawn? That doesn't get you to the office at 7:30 AM in the winter. That is, our schedule is not a biologically-based schedule. "Morning" (as defined by our society) is not the biological default.
      - EpicEng 9y ago
        Sure, but you're quibbling over an hour here or there. When people use the term "night person" they don't mean someone who wakes up at e.g. 8 instead of 7, we're talking about pushing back work by many hours, which just isn't possible for most people without a much shorter work day (I'm ok with that!)
    - saulrh 9y ago
      Grades in primary and secondary school jump significantly if you push start times back from 8 AM to more like 10 AM. It may be the biological default to wake up in the morning, but there's absolutely nothing that says that peak performance should be reached the instant you wake up. If anything, I'd expect exactly the opposite! It takes time to get caches warmed, adjust biochemistry away from resting levels and toward operational levels, and get dumb maintenance tasks (breakfast, travel to workplace, "milk the cows") out of the way and move to higher-value and more complex activities (hunting, crafting, socialization). Until you do those things you're not going to be operating well, and many early-morning tasks wouldn't require peak performance and optimizations for an early peak would be wasted. I'd also expect intellectual pursuits to be more strongly affected; you need to be able to not get eaten by a tiger at absolutely any time, but you can choose when to sit down and start knapping flint or talking to people, which means you have more freedom and reward when optimizing the timing of peak performance on intellectual tasks.
- cat199 9y ago
  > Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? I'm guessing OP doesn't mean 'presumed valid' but 'preferred in decisions' despite previous practice and ostensibly minority position..
  - travisjungroth 9y ago
    It's like everyone missed the second half of that sentence! Morning was presumed valid and night wasn't. That's the point.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? If I read the story right, there was one morning person and several night people. Why should the one person's preferences be presumed more valid than the several persons' preferences?
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    Cultural momentum (as an "is" not a "should").
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I think they meant more valid than the others. But if most people on the team are night person schedules, it should be on the morning person to adapt more.
davehtaylor 9y ago
> Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that. I think you really nailed it here. People who aren't "morning people" are viewed as lazy, strange, and unmotivated. And it's very frustrating to try to make people understand that I don't stay up until 3:00am every night and sleep until noon, or that I'm not lazy because I'm not flitting around the room like a humming bird the moment I get out of bed. It's like it's completely impossible to have this conversation because people are totally unwilling to see things in any other way. Also, the early worm gets eaten.
watwut 9y ago
In tech it seems to be opposite. Staying late make you seem like hard workers, but nobody cares if you come soon.
krylon 9y ago
It is more complex than that. I do not own a car, so I have to use public transportation to get to work, and that dries up outside the main working hours. Another issue is that it often makes sense for people that work together to be in the same place at the same time. The implicit assumption that it is somehow morally better to get up early in the morning is very prevalent in Germany, too. I think it's a protestant thing, or at least a Christianity thing - getting up late in the morning implies sleeping in which implies laziness, which is a deadly sin. In fact, I remember listening to an interview with a neurologist (or a biologist whose focus was the nervous system), who said it was absurd to force children to get up as early in the morning as the adults, because for the first one or two lessons, their ability to learn would be impaired anyway. There is one thing to be said, though, in favour of uniform working hours - it is that you do not need to worry about when your friends are free or working. During my Zivildienst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst) I worked in a hospital in shift work. Working the early shift meant I could not go out the evening before, because I had to get up at 05:00, so I had get to bed early; working the late shift meant that I only got off work when it was already evening.
EpicEng 9y ago
part of it, yes, but unless you work in a complete vacuum people will need your input throughout the day. They may need support, or your attendance at a meeting, or maybe the just need to ask a simple question. I couldn't support one of my devs asking for hours completely opposite everyone else as it would slow the entire team down.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  For 99.9999999999999% of things, waiting for a response is not going to kill anyone. The sun will still come up tomorrow, the business will still be around, and things will continue as normal.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  We've got a minority working in the US and a majority across the Pacific. It adds friction, but you work it out. Even in the local office, a couple of the devs tend to have personal matters in the morning, but work late into the night. Again, you work it out, and it's not a big deal.

dictum 9y ago

> Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? It's as hard for the morning person to deal with night-person preferences as it's hard for a night person to deal with morning-person preferences. (Disclaimer: I'm a morning person and I'm not American.)

davehtaylor 9y ago
I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  It's the Ben Franklin Poor Richard's Almanac thing: "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He was also the buttmunch that gave us daylight savings time.
  - core-questions 9y ago
    I used to be really against DST, but honestly, it's the only thing that actually lets me see the damn sun at all in the winter, so now I'm a fan.
    - krylon 9y ago
      But DST is in summer, isn't it? At least that is what I have been told: In summer, days are so long and start so early that we might as well move the whole day back by an hour, so get up early, finish work early and still have a couple of hours of daylight left. Full disclosure: I am not a fan of DST, but I do not expect the current situation to change. In Europe, almost(?) all countries use it, so if just Germany (where I live) abolished DST, we would be out of sync with the rest of Europe for half of the year. Dealing with dates and times as a programmer is already confusing enough; if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain. And I do not see that happening anytime soon.
      - surement 9y ago
        > if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain There are already countless exceptions to DST and people seem to be doing fine. E.g. in Australia there are two regions in the same time zone where only one has DST, meaning they are out of sync for half the year.
        lazyasciiart 9y ago
        It's a source of constant complaints, massive costs and is totally bloody stupid, assuming you're talking about the NSW/QLD border.
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/File:DST_Countries_Map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#/media/Fi... In areas that are arguably Europe, it looks like Iceland, Kaliningrad Oblast, and Belarus are the places that stick out. I'm in California; most of Arizona is permanently in daylight savings, and we work with a lot of developers in China and India, which don't observe it. It certainly complicates things, sometimes. I've done work on my product's logging subsystem before, and especially bugs with recorded times. Dealing with different DST rules is a mess.
- jrs235 9y ago
  Perhaps "morning person" is the default because many people have families and children and whether or not they operate best in the morning or evening, they are forced to operate in the morning because that's when school time is scheduled (the children are at school) and the children are home in the evening (default family time). I'm wishing that someday we can get to more flexible schooling hours. I think if we want to change the "morning default position" then we need to address schooling defaults.
  - davehtaylor 9y ago
    Schooling is definitely a major issue. My nephew has to be at school by 7:15 am. It’s absolutley asinine to believe that pre-teens and teens can be functional or able to actually learn anything at such an hour. Not to mention the fact that every school is different. His younger brother, for example doesn’t start school until nearl 9:00. And this is an elementary and a high school in the same district. It’s insane. So their mom has to figure out how to get them to school a vastly different times, then figure out how to make it to work at a reasonable time given her schedule. I definitely agree that this is a major issue that we need to address.
    - finnh 9y ago
      This is slowly changing. Here in Seattle we just went through a major shift where (most) public elementary schools start early, and the middle/highschool kids shift later.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  But morning really is the default; it's our biological default. Most people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night naturally. Many people have small children, good luck remaining a night person with a 1 year old in the house. There are real reasons here, it's not just some arbitrary decision.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Biologically, don't most people wake up at dawn? That doesn't get you to the office at 7:30 AM in the winter. That is, our schedule is not a biologically-based schedule. "Morning" (as defined by our society) is not the biological default.
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      Sure, but you're quibbling over an hour here or there. When people use the term "night person" they don't mean someone who wakes up at e.g. 8 instead of 7, we're talking about pushing back work by many hours, which just isn't possible for most people without a much shorter work day (I'm ok with that!)
  - saulrh 9y ago
    Grades in primary and secondary school jump significantly if you push start times back from 8 AM to more like 10 AM. It may be the biological default to wake up in the morning, but there's absolutely nothing that says that peak performance should be reached the instant you wake up. If anything, I'd expect exactly the opposite! It takes time to get caches warmed, adjust biochemistry away from resting levels and toward operational levels, and get dumb maintenance tasks (breakfast, travel to workplace, "milk the cows") out of the way and move to higher-value and more complex activities (hunting, crafting, socialization). Until you do those things you're not going to be operating well, and many early-morning tasks wouldn't require peak performance and optimizations for an early peak would be wasted. I'd also expect intellectual pursuits to be more strongly affected; you need to be able to not get eaten by a tiger at absolutely any time, but you can choose when to sit down and start knapping flint or talking to people, which means you have more freedom and reward when optimizing the timing of peak performance on intellectual tasks.
cat199 9y ago
> Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? I'm guessing OP doesn't mean 'presumed valid' but 'preferred in decisions' despite previous practice and ostensibly minority position..
- travisjungroth 9y ago
  It's like everyone missed the second half of that sentence! Morning was presumed valid and night wasn't. That's the point.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? If I read the story right, there was one morning person and several night people. Why should the one person's preferences be presumed more valid than the several persons' preferences?
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Cultural momentum (as an "is" not a "should").
s73ver_ 9y ago
I think they meant more valid than the others. But if most people on the team are night person schedules, it should be on the morning person to adapt more.

davehtaylor 9y ago

> Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that. I think you really nailed it here. People who aren't "morning people" are viewed as lazy, strange, and unmotivated. And it's very frustrating to try to make people understand that I don't stay up until 3:00am every night and sleep until noon, or that I'm not lazy because I'm not flitting around the room like a humming bird the moment I get out of bed. It's like it's completely impossible to have this conversation because people are totally unwilling to see things in any other way. Also, the early worm gets eaten.

watwut 9y ago

In tech it seems to be opposite. Staying late make you seem like hard workers, but nobody cares if you come soon.

krylon 9y ago

It is more complex than that. I do not own a car, so I have to use public transportation to get to work, and that dries up outside the main working hours. Another issue is that it often makes sense for people that work together to be in the same place at the same time. The implicit assumption that it is somehow morally better to get up early in the morning is very prevalent in Germany, too. I think it's a protestant thing, or at least a Christianity thing - getting up late in the morning implies sleeping in which implies laziness, which is a deadly sin. In fact, I remember listening to an interview with a neurologist (or a biologist whose focus was the nervous system), who said it was absurd to force children to get up as early in the morning as the adults, because for the first one or two lessons, their ability to learn would be impaired anyway. There is one thing to be said, though, in favour of uniform working hours - it is that you do not need to worry about when your friends are free or working. During my Zivildienst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst) I worked in a hospital in shift work. Working the early shift meant I could not go out the evening before, because I had to get up at 05:00, so I had get to bed early; working the late shift meant that I only got off work when it was already evening.

EpicEng 9y ago

part of it, yes, but unless you work in a complete vacuum people will need your input throughout the day. They may need support, or your attendance at a meeting, or maybe the just need to ask a simple question. I couldn't support one of my devs asking for hours completely opposite everyone else as it would slow the entire team down.

s73ver_ 9y ago
For 99.9999999999999% of things, waiting for a response is not going to kill anyone. The sun will still come up tomorrow, the business will still be around, and things will continue as normal.
khedoros1 9y ago
We've got a minority working in the US and a majority across the Pacific. It adds friction, but you work it out. Even in the local office, a couple of the devs tend to have personal matters in the morning, but work late into the night. Again, you work it out, and it's not a big deal.