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It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria. The real reason behind being in the office, 9 times ou

It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria. The real reason behind being in the office, 9 times out of 10 (made up internet stats), is because your manager doesn't know how to gauge productivity and thus uses the bum's on seat approach. In my experience, having a technical manager means you're much more likely to get flexiable hours or remote working, where the manager knows they can check on your productivity by looking at commit history and project managment tools. Same deal might happen with non-technical managers after you have built a relationship of trust. Exceptions exist of course, but most everyone else doesn't have a clue what they're doing, so they make sure you show up, tell you what to do, squeeze you on impossible deadlines, and basically make your life miserable. It's just the status quo where you have middle management trained to be managers without any real knowledge in their field they are managing. That's not to say there aren't any advantages to the 9-5, just my personal opinion based on anecdotal experiences. :p

bluedino 13y ago
> It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria How often does this happen where you're not working with a single other person? Another developer, QA, designers, product managers... I can see if you're working on your own startup, but if you're on a team of people it's very unhelpful to have any one person just go off on their own for days a time.
- nkozyra 13y ago
  Precisely. If you're the only one on the project, it may make sense that you make your own hours. That of course assumes that your deadline permits scheduling offsets with project/product managers, etc. Otherwise you're talking about wasted time due to the staggering of schedules. But those situations are pretty rare in most companies.
- ownagefool 13y ago
  I don't know, I've been working from home primarily for the last 3 years. We use IRC, XMPP, e-mail, version control systems, project managment software, etc. With all this tech, it's pretty simple for me to do something and leave it for someone else to pickup while I sleep, as long as we both go to the effort to do our parts properly in the first place. Even in an office, working on a startup, I would often find myself working on my code, while other people are working on theirs with the expectation I'll do mine correct. It just seems to work from my experience, though I'd still much rather prefer to live close to work to pop in and attend meetings without it being a plane flight away.
michaelt 13y ago
Every so often there's a HN discussion about task effort estimation - usually that no-one is very good at it. Take your best estimate, one joke goes, then increment the units so days become weeks and weeks become months. It'll always take twice as long as you expect, goes another, even after you've doubled your estimate to take this into account. Can one gauge productivity by tasks completed without a good estimate of the effort required for a given task?

bluedino 13y ago

> It depends what kind of role you're doing, but lets pretend it's pure dev with no real support criteria How often does this happen where you're not working with a single other person? Another developer, QA, designers, product managers... I can see if you're working on your own startup, but if you're on a team of people it's very unhelpful to have any one person just go off on their own for days a time.

nkozyra 13y ago
Precisely. If you're the only one on the project, it may make sense that you make your own hours. That of course assumes that your deadline permits scheduling offsets with project/product managers, etc. Otherwise you're talking about wasted time due to the staggering of schedules. But those situations are pretty rare in most companies.
ownagefool 13y ago
I don't know, I've been working from home primarily for the last 3 years. We use IRC, XMPP, e-mail, version control systems, project managment software, etc. With all this tech, it's pretty simple for me to do something and leave it for someone else to pickup while I sleep, as long as we both go to the effort to do our parts properly in the first place. Even in an office, working on a startup, I would often find myself working on my code, while other people are working on theirs with the expectation I'll do mine correct. It just seems to work from my experience, though I'd still much rather prefer to live close to work to pop in and attend meetings without it being a plane flight away.

michaelt 13y ago

Every so often there's a HN discussion about task effort estimation - usually that no-one is very good at it. Take your best estimate, one joke goes, then increment the units so days become weeks and weeks become months. It'll always take twice as long as you expect, goes another, even after you've doubled your estimate to take this into account. Can one gauge productivity by tasks completed without a good estimate of the effort required for a given task?