[shailesh]

True story: a CMM Level 5 software organization had precisely the exact same issue. There was a PM, who would literally spend the entire day wasting time and start real work around 5 PM. Then work till late night.

Once he advised me, "Always make sure that you send an e-mail, late at night to anybody in the organization, before you call it day."

"Why?"

To make it short, per his advise, the single most important thing about those e-mails, wasn't the contents, but just the timestamp.

[arethuza]

You would think that PM would have learned about the feature that quite a few email systems have to send an email at a particular time! (e.g. Outlook has "Do not deliver before" option).

[shailesh]

:). The logs at physical security could not be faked: they used to have a pen and paper system; it was a little more than a decade ago.

[vonmoltke]

The last place I worked, 18 months ago, that required after-hours logs still used pen and paper. Plus, they left the log books out all the time, so it was easy when you signed in to see who else was coming in after hours, going back weeks sometimes.

[Argorak]

You can get the same effect by coming early and making sure people notice that you were in ahead of them. When done correctly, you get the "behind the project"-bonus without overtime.

[__--__]

I find that coming in early doesn't produce the same social effect as staying late. I'm still not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the perception of personal sacrifice? Coming in early doesn't impact your social schedule, while staying late says you're willing to sacrifice your evenings for the company. Coming in early just means you're willing to wake up earlier.