I have the same schedule now. It's much better since you avoid the crazy traffic of the typical 9-to-5'ers and getting to sleep in is the best thing ever.
I made the mistake of moving 18 miles (San Jose) from where I work (Mountain View). Two years ago traffic wasn't bad but I swear it's getting worse. If I leave the house at 9:00 it takes 45-60 minutes to get to work. If there's a major accident or problem it can take up to 90 (happened once). Now I just don't leave the house before 10:00. My commute is less than 30 minutes and I regain 30-60 minutes every day.
I feel very fortunate to work at a company and with a team that supports my preferred schedule.
I agree it's getting worse over the last year or so. My commute is about 8 miles, from Seaport to 92 on 101, and I never get much above 10 mph. Bumper to bumper the whole way. It didn't used to be like that.
yeah, ive been doing 880 from hayward into Cupertino for 5 years now, and its been getting worse, which i guess is a good thing because people have jobs? or bad because there are too many people here.....
I find this interesting. How do people collaborate? Did most of your team work the same hours? Do you just schedule meetings from noon-4? I would personally hate that schedule as someone with a family.
You can get the same no-rush-hour benefit by going the opposite direction; I show up to the office at 7am, and I'm out the door by 330 at the latest. There's somebody else in my office that I've only ever overlapped with for a couple hours at a time because he basically never shows up before noon. He used to give me a hard time about how early I left every day until I explained that I was showing up to the office an hour or two after he went to sleep each night.
I'm in California and I try to get meetings scheduled for the late morning or early afternoon. 11am meetings are totally reasonable for anybody on the west coast, and it's not too hard to convince people in (for example) New York to not schedule meetings for before 10am their time. On the rare occasion that I need to make a 6am phone call with somebody who's a real go-getter on the east cast, I'll just bite the bullet and show up at 6, and then take off around 2.
On the other hand, I used to work in a bakery, so waking up at 7am is still sort of like sleeping in for me. But there's nothing like finishing your day at 330; I love it.
At my office they seem to be biased against this -- whatever time you get in, if you disappear before 5 there's a sense that you're shirking. And this despite what is, overall, a super healthy culture. There's no stigma at all about showing up at 830 and leaving at 1700, but showing up at 700 doesn't seem to allow you to leave earlier without incurring raised eyebrows. I wonder if this is unusual, since I've not experienced it before.
My team mostly works similar hours to me (1-9, as I said elsewhere) but my previous team was more nine-to-fivey. We just had meetings after lunch, it wasn't a big deal. A couple folks on the team had kids and left every day at 5:00, and I did their code reviews in the evenings (so they were ready waiting when they came in the next day), and they did mine in the mornings, and it worked fine.
I like 11-4 as core hours. Not to early for the folks who like to sleep in, not to late for people who want to get home to their family, and there is still 5 hours of overlap for meeting.
As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.
It depends on your role, PMs and managers would obviously have a lot more. I'm just a lowly engineer and looking at my calendar this week, I've have 2.5 hours of regular meetings, 3 hours of interviews (though that's an outlier, I normally do 1 interview a week, which is 1 hour long), and 2 hours of "tech talks" (which is not really a meeting, it's basically people from other teams talking about what they've been working on).
Including weekly one hour of tech talk I have 2-3 hours of meeting every week and I love it that way. 10 hours a week would be terrible. (Not a Googler btw).
I'm EST. When I work with CA companies I tend to end up just taking meetings at 8-9pm. When working with people halfway across the world there have been a few midnight and 1am calls.
Every brilliant Googler not collaborating with other brilliant Googlers is also not collaborating with other brilliant talents at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...