Thanks, that's a really useful distinctin. I've been thinking along these lines already before, but it's useful to concretely name and describe different modes

Thanks, that's a really useful distinctin. I've been thinking along these lines already before, but it's useful to concretely name and describe different modes of work, to better incorporate them in my mental model. What I had in mind was things like Customer Support or QA personel (which exist even in start-ups & tech companies), where the tasks are pretty clearly defined, it's easy to track progress, and it's fairly important to "do the hours" (e.g. if you need 24-hour customer support), but you can offer things like location independence (precisely because work is so easy to track). Unfortunately, however, I think that most programming work (and this probably extends to most technological work) isn't quite as easy to categorise... basically, even if your objective is 100% convergent ("our client wants this, we'll make it"), there's still different (better or worse) ways of getting to that goal, so there's still a lot of creativity/decisionmaking involved... and it's obvious that simple metrics don't really work ("I fixed 100 bugs today!" "Yeah but you wrote all of them yesterday.")...