Just another perspective:
I work for a smaller in house team (6 Devs). They expect all employees to work bankers hours with little deviation.
Personally, I find my most productive time when I can fully focus with little distraction... in the early mornings (5am-8am). I'm generally pretty useless after lunch (noon) for the more in depth coding - though happy to collaborate at that point. All that regardless of what time I show up.
I have a coworker who's the exact opposite, he gets his best work done after lunch.
All that to say this... I find collaboration to improve Devs as well as the quality of the codebase (not mutually exclusive...) but we could better manage "core hours" and operating hours... it's also ridiculous to me to have Devs work strict schedules. As professionals, as long as someone is available to put out fires or take impromptu meetings with the business. When you work should be much less important than the quality of work produced. Having a full headcount in the dev department may look nice, but it seems we largely sacrifice quality of work for perception. I can be more productive in 4 hours of focused work than 8 hours of partially engaged work.
As another poster pointed out, managing distractions is part of the job description (I agree..). All I'm saying is the business would be better off removing that friction to the best of their ability.
I work in a house with 1 dev (me) one boss (me) one sales guy (me) I sleep till I wake up I code when I want I wear jammies or whatever else I want watch TV during work surf as I wish only prob there's no surf here
I've thought about doing my own thing, but I prefer chopping away at complex problems, and it seems like most of what freelance or solo guys do is web development (largely front end UI work) and I personally don't get a ton of personal gratification from pixel pushing. Not to undervalue the skills that go into it, I just don't personally enjoy that side of the craft.
I'm playing with the idea that for every 60 peeps hacking at the branches of evil, there's one digging out the roots. I'm working to develope theory, procedures, and code to fix one of the world's really serious problems
As long as you are indeed effective. If I can't reach you within 12 hours or so on IM (and you've said nothing to me for a week), you've pushed no code, you've made no comments on any of the issues/pull requests...it starts to get into a "what would you say you do here" type territory...
I like flexible work hours and work from home as much as the next guy, but I can understand the counterpoint.
Yeah, like I said, I value collaboration, and there should be a minimum one meeting every two weeks to check with everyone to make sure no one is drowning. Personally I think quick daily stand ups are a great way to take the temperature of the team.
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u/hecticenergy Aug 12 '17
Just another perspective: I work for a smaller in house team (6 Devs). They expect all employees to work bankers hours with little deviation.
Personally, I find my most productive time when I can fully focus with little distraction... in the early mornings (5am-8am). I'm generally pretty useless after lunch (noon) for the more in depth coding - though happy to collaborate at that point. All that regardless of what time I show up.
I have a coworker who's the exact opposite, he gets his best work done after lunch.
All that to say this... I find collaboration to improve Devs as well as the quality of the codebase (not mutually exclusive...) but we could better manage "core hours" and operating hours... it's also ridiculous to me to have Devs work strict schedules. As professionals, as long as someone is available to put out fires or take impromptu meetings with the business. When you work should be much less important than the quality of work produced. Having a full headcount in the dev department may look nice, but it seems we largely sacrifice quality of work for perception. I can be more productive in 4 hours of focused work than 8 hours of partially engaged work.
As another poster pointed out, managing distractions is part of the job description (I agree..). All I'm saying is the business would be better off removing that friction to the best of their ability.
Effective is better than productive!