[throwaway420]

* The article makes some great observations about energy levels. I think you can definitely run a company more productively if employees had more leeway about picking their own hours as long as the job gets done. Anecdotally, I'd get far more work done if I set aside just around 9-midnight every night for coding from home rather than waking up early and slogging to an office.

* The article presents some opinions without really justifying them. According to who exactly does the 40-hour work week not work anymore? It works great for some folks, it works badly for others. Personally, I'd rather see more people working less, and I think more jobs should be more flexible about things like remote working and letting people pick their hours when possible.

* This article also erroneously gets some history wrong. People like to cite some of Ford's management innovations as some magnanimous gesture on his part to give employees enough cash to buy more products. The reality is that he was initially having a problem keeping employees because assembly-line work is so monotonous and doesn't leave much room for human contact and many employees would quit or inconsistently show up to work after a while. He was trying to make working conditions as good as possible to reduce employee turnover/absenteeism, greatly reducing his recruiting/training expenses in the long run and making things run smoother on a daily basis. It was in his self-interest to do this because once you got a great Ford job you wouldn't quit or just not show up to go to a baseball game or whatever people did back in those days. I believe some people erroneously got this part of history wrong because there's a narrative out there that the free market is some kind of predatory exploitative thing that needs to be completely controlled or it will work to destroy people. To me, that's incorrect because employers also need to compete for employees' labor. Going forward, innovative and smart companies will increasingly offer things like remote working, picking your own hours, limited work week, etc to compete for the most talented employees. Some companies might want butts in seats at 9AM and will compete by offering cash. That's fine too, let people have a choice.