[gorthol]

That how I would maximize developer productivity (but NOT working hours) if I owned a company:

- Let them work at home, at any time they want. Just reserve some hours for meetings or stand-ups if you want. Don't control the hours, control that the tasks are progressing.

- Open source parts of the codebase, let the developers own some modules or components on their github accounts. This way the quality of the code will be a personal matter to them.

- If shit goes down or hard deadlines approach (this happens) pay overtime and do a post-mortem analysis of what happened but DON'T turn that into a blame fest just cold analysis because most often than not its random factors of life (downtime for family or health reasons, whatever) and of coding not being a hard science (that external library that looked so sweet turned a minefield for example ) the real causes. Anybody trying to do that in the postmortem should be called out.

- If the last point happens too much, fire the manager/lead/CTO (normal programmers should be fired too sometimes but only when their performance is substandard and this is sometimes that will be easy to see day by day).