I have to admit that my experience has been the exact opposite. I've seen the whole flex time system work best when everyone is an interchangeable factor cog a

I have to admit that my experience has been the exact opposite. I've seen the whole flex time system work best when everyone is an interchangeable factor cog and completely fail when people are useful knowledge workers. My hypothetical example would be writing a search engine. You have two brilliant knowledge workers. Alice is a brilliant algorithm specialist who has a new way to sort lists in O(1) time. Bob is a genius data center guy who can split anything across any number of servers. The only problem is that Alice is a morning person who works best from 7am to 5PM, while Bob's brain doesn't even start until 4PM, though he'll still be wide awake at 2AM. Alice understand the theory behind parallelization, but she doesn't have the experience to truly write great code on the massive scale you need. Bob can find his way around a tree, but the fiddly details of O(1) search are beyond him. Thus, you really need both of them working together to make any progress. However, they're only together for an hour and Bob's always deadlocked by his inability to get answers from Alice while she sleeps. Similarly, Alice can answer his e-mails in the morning, but anything she write before Bob arrives will have to be thrown out because it won't scale properly. Now, if the office forces them to work from noon until nine, then you'll get nine hours of work out. Granted, for four of those hours, Alice will be tired. Bob will be tired for another four. Still, if they can even work at a quarter capacity during those times, you're still getting three times as much done, while simultaneously giving both employee's back a full hour in each day. How do you handle a situation like this?