[davehtaylor]

I agree that the ideas aren't necessarily generalizable, but what if we shifted to an idea that people's individual schedules reflect when they specifically are most productive. Someone else who replied said they were most productive in the morning. Great! Let them have and earlier start time. For me, I'm completely useless in the morning. Sure, I can be in the office at 8:00am, but you're not getting any meaningful work out of me until late morning or noon-ish. So let me come in at noon and work until 6:00. And for someone else who is super productive in the evening hours, if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not?

I get that there are issues of collaboration or interaction that may be necessary. But in general, it seems like, as long as your job doesn't depend on customer interaction or some other constraint, why not let people work a schedule that suits their lifestyle, and lets them work when they are most productive?

[nitrogen]

...if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not?

Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that.

I once saw a workplace where there were night-person-friendly policies and schedules. Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid, and all night-person preferences had to be fought for and justified.

So if you want to reach a world with truly optimal flexible schedules, first you'll need to wrest ownership of the culture from the "morning people are better" people who currently dominate it.

[davehtaylor]

> Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that.

I think you really nailed it here. People who aren't "morning people" are viewed as lazy, strange, and unmotivated. And it's very frustrating to try to make people understand that I don't stay up until 3:00am every night and sleep until noon, or that I'm not lazy because I'm not flitting around the room like a humming bird the moment I get out of bed. It's like it's completely impossible to have this conversation because people are totally unwilling to see things in any other way.

Also, the early worm gets eaten.

[krylon]

It is more complex than that. I do not own a car, so I have to use public transportation to get to work, and that dries up outside the main working hours.

Another issue is that it often makes sense for people that work together to be in the same place at the same time.

The implicit assumption that it is somehow morally better to get up early in the morning is very prevalent in Germany, too. I think it's a protestant thing, or at least a Christianity thing - getting up late in the morning implies sleeping in which implies laziness, which is a deadly sin. In fact, I remember listening to an interview with a neurologist (or a biologist whose focus was the nervous system), who said it was absurd to force children to get up as early in the morning as the adults, because for the first one or two lessons, their ability to learn would be impaired anyway.

There is one thing to be said, though, in favour of uniform working hours - it is that you do not need to worry about when your friends are free or working. During my Zivildienst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst) I worked in a hospital in shift work. Working the early shift meant I could not go out the evening before, because I had to get up at 05:00, so I had get to bed early; working the late shift meant that I only got off work when it was already evening.

[dictum]

> Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid

Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? It's as hard for the morning person to deal with night-person preferences as it's hard for a night person to deal with morning-person preferences.

(Disclaimer: I'm a morning person and I'm not American.)

[davehtaylor]

I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.

[jrs235]

Perhaps "morning person" is the default because many people have families and children and whether or not they operate best in the morning or evening, they are forced to operate in the morning because that's when school time is scheduled (the children are at school) and the children are home in the evening (default family time). I'm wishing that someday we can get to more flexible schooling hours. I think if we want to change the "morning default position" then we need to address schooling defaults.

[davehtaylor]

Schooling is definitely a major issue. My nephew has to be at school by 7:15 am. It’s absolutley asinine to believe that pre-teens and teens can be functional or able to actually learn anything at such an hour. Not to mention the fact that every school is different. His younger brother, for example doesn’t start school until nearl 9:00. And this is an elementary and a high school in the same district. It’s insane. So their mom has to figure out how to get them to school a vastly different times, then figure out how to make it to work at a reasonable time given her schedule.

I definitely agree that this is a major issue that we need to address.

[finnh]

This is slowly changing. Here in Seattle we just went through a major shift where (most) public elementary schools start early, and the middle/highschool kids shift later.

[EpicEng]

But morning really is the default; it's our biological default. Most people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night naturally. Many people have small children, good luck remaining a night person with a 1 year old in the house. There are real reasons here, it's not just some arbitrary decision.

[saulrh]

Grades in primary and secondary school jump significantly if you push start times back from 8 AM to more like 10 AM. It may be the biological default to wake up in the morning, but there's absolutely nothing that says that peak performance should be reached the instant you wake up. If anything, I'd expect exactly the opposite! It takes time to get caches warmed, adjust biochemistry away from resting levels and toward operational levels, and get dumb maintenance tasks (breakfast, travel to workplace, "milk the cows") out of the way and move to higher-value and more complex activities (hunting, crafting, socialization). Until you do those things you're not going to be operating well, and many early-morning tasks wouldn't require peak performance and optimizations for an early peak would be wasted. I'd also expect intellectual pursuits to be more strongly affected; you need to be able to not get eaten by a tiger at absolutely any time, but you can choose when to sit down and start knapping flint or talking to people, which means you have more freedom and reward when optimizing the timing of peak performance on intellectual tasks.

[AnimalMuppet]

Biologically, don't most people wake up at dawn? That doesn't get you to the office at 7:30 AM in the winter.

That is, our schedule is not a biologically-based schedule. "Morning" (as defined by our society) is not the biological default.

[EpicEng]

Sure, but you're quibbling over an hour here or there. When people use the term "night person" they don't mean someone who wakes up at e.g. 8 instead of 7, we're talking about pushing back work by many hours, which just isn't possible for most people without a much shorter work day (I'm ok with that!)

[khedoros1]

Without electrical lighting and such, I'd agree. Sleep not long after sundown, a mid-night period of wakefulness, wake up for the day around sunrise. Ever since I can remember, my own default is to maintain activity late into the night, and then sleep as close to 8 or 9 hours as I'm permitted. Granted, that's a little rough if my 3 year old happens to wake up at 7:30, but 8:30 or 9 is pretty common for him; at 1, he often slept until 10, after being put to bed at 8pm.

8:30 - 10:00 seems to be the time range that I'll be ready to get up, when left to my own schedule. It's usually 2-3 hours after I wake up that I'm really ready to jump into a heavy project. The person who wakes up at 6 is right on target to start working, if they come in at 8. Me, I always feel like I could've used a couple more hours of sleep, even if I went to bed at 10pm the night before.

[logfromblammo]

It's the Ben Franklin Poor Richard's Almanac thing: "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

He was also the buttmunch that gave us daylight savings time.

[core-questions]

I used to be really against DST, but honestly, it's the only thing that actually lets me see the damn sun at all in the winter, so now I'm a fan.

[krylon]

But DST is in summer, isn't it? At least that is what I have been told: In summer, days are so long and start so early that we might as well move the whole day back by an hour, so get up early, finish work early and still have a couple of hours of daylight left.

Full disclosure: I am not a fan of DST, but I do not expect the current situation to change. In Europe, almost(?) all countries use it, so if just Germany (where I live) abolished DST, we would be out of sync with the rest of Europe for half of the year. Dealing with dates and times as a programmer is already confusing enough; if DST was to go, all countries would have to drop it simultaneously, or else the resulting patchwork would be too much of a pain. And I do not see that happening anytime soon.

[BalinKing]

As someone who lives in Arizona myself, it is a bit strange to have (virtually) the rest of the world change their clocks without us... makes scheduling remote meetings difficult, if nothing else. (On the other hand, we don't have to worry about changing our clocks in the first place, so there's that?)

For some extra fun, the Navajo Nation observes DST, and they're _inside_ Arizona.

[goodcanadian]

Why do you believe Ben Franklin had anything to do with daylight saving time? The only thing I've ever seen by him in regards to DST roundly satirized the idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

[logfromblammo]

He wrote a paper (humorously) suggesting that Parisians would save on candle wax if they got out of bed earlier. Apparently Germany missed the humor when they pushed the clocks back in WW1 to save lamp oil.

It is possible that DST would have happened without Franklin, but I blame him anyway, because I never liked his sanctimonious attitude toward waking up early.

[bovermyer]

Context is important. You should read about why those two (completely unrelated) things came about when they did.

For example, there was a period of history where it was much safer to drink beer all day instead of water. Without context, that sounds like a really bad idea.

[logfromblammo]

To make a long story short, it was because you boil the wort when you make beer, and the kinds of beers that people drank all day were small beers and session ales, with lower alcohol content (and cheaper to buy).

Those things actually are related. Franklin proposed that Parisians could save on candle wax by getting out of bed earlier, as a joke. Nobody actually changed a clock until WW1 when Germany did it to save lamp oil.

Franklin likely promoted the lark lifestyle only because he was one, rather than from any real evidence of objective superiority. He participated in a business group that looked at successful businesses with an aim to emulate their practices. It is possible that his advice to work early was just cargo culting, in following with a long line of sanctimonious lark philosophers that painted their owl counterparts as slothful or lazy.

Standard business hours favor being a lark because those are lark hours! And then they have the nerve to be all chipper and cheerful every morning, at a time when every decent owl would prefer to be getting one last REM cycle in. How do you think they'd like it if we made them stay up past midnight every day?

[AnimalMuppet]

Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? If I read the story right, there was one morning person and several night people. Why should the one person's preferences be presumed more valid than the several persons' preferences?

[khedoros1]

Cultural momentum (as an "is" not a "should").

[cat199]

> Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid?

I'm guessing OP doesn't mean 'presumed valid' but 'preferred in decisions' despite previous practice and ostensibly minority position..

[travisjungroth]

It's like everyone missed the second half of that sentence! Morning was presumed valid and night wasn't. That's the point.

[s73ver_]

I think they meant more valid than the others. But if most people on the team are night person schedules, it should be on the morning person to adapt more.

[watwut]

In tech it seems to be opposite. Staying late make you seem like hard workers, but nobody cares if you come soon.

[EpicEng]

part of it, yes, but unless you work in a complete vacuum people will need your input throughout the day. They may need support, or your attendance at a meeting, or maybe the just need to ask a simple question. I couldn't support one of my devs asking for hours completely opposite everyone else as it would slow the entire team down.

[khedoros1]

We've got a minority working in the US and a majority across the Pacific. It adds friction, but you work it out. Even in the local office, a couple of the devs tend to have personal matters in the morning, but work late into the night. Again, you work it out, and it's not a big deal.

[s73ver_]

For 99.9999999999999% of things, waiting for a response is not going to kill anyone. The sun will still come up tomorrow, the business will still be around, and things will continue as normal.

[lazyasciiart]

It turns out there are people who literally believe that having multiple people in a room is 'productive' even when there is no agenda, no goal and no fucking point to doing so. So that kind of person sees 'being at the office at the same time as other people' as a goal in itself.

[mangodrunk]

It's rather annoying that there's a thought that by random chance something (who knows what that something would be) can come out of people being in the same place at the same time.

I do see value in being at the same place/time when you are working with someone, as it's so much easier and more fluid when collaborating in person.

[ubertaco]

Shifting a schedule is one thing (in fact, I work on a shifted schedule on days I commute; from 6:45am or 7am to 3pm, due to bad local traffic); cutting your workday effectively in half is another. This article is touting "forget your 8-hour/9-hour job, just work a 5-hour day instead!"

That'd be nice from a free-time perspective, but it doesn't line up with business needs.

[mangodrunk]

If only we started valuing free time as a society. If all the automation and productivity gains, you would think we could work less now. What modern comforts necessitate an 8 hour work schedule?

I would rather have more free time and less money.

[majormajor]

Yeah, 8PM to 2AM is tricky for the same reason as international teams since you might have zero face-to-face overlap with someone doing 10AM-6PM, but I've worked at three different places that were all fine with a less extreme version of that (noon-to-8, for instance, seems pretty common, or even 3-11PM for the occasional outlier).

Ask around, look around, and discuss stuff like this before signing the offer if it's important to you. It's definitely not impossible. :) Barring a union or such, things like this will only change one job at a time.

[mjevans]

The way to make it not tricky is to be //remote friendly// in your work culture and get the interactions externalized and committed to information storage and dissemination systems.

Make processes phased and allow for multiple inputs (maybe blinded) during each phase, followed by a digestion step. Repeat this cycle until a strong consensus is reached.