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Comment by xyzzy4 | Hacker News Reader

Why do you want to sit near other people? Then they can see what time you come in or leave the office.

Then they can see what time you come in or leave the office.

If you feel the need to hide the hours you work then there is something very wrong.

In the ideal world that might be true. In the world we live in, it's very easy to focus on working hours rather than what people actually achieve.

This isn't the "I get done in 3 hours that which would take Bob 8!" discussion that HN loves, this is someone just working odd hours.

I very often work 6a-2p and I will occasionally get odd looks or the random comment when I am packing up for the day an hour or less after people return from lunch. If you're there when someone arrives, they assume you got there 5 minutes ago, not 3 hours, at least subconsciously.

I have worked on a noon to midnight in office schedule for long periods of time and noticed most people sharing the office with you take it psychologically as noon to five even when you are actually in office 50% longer than them.

If your manager is fine with it, who cares what other people think?

What people think can cause misconceptions, which can give you hostile co-workers and negative opinions.

Nobody, until someone gets promoted and now there's a manager (maybe even your manager) who has a negative opinion of you.

This is office politics. If employee value to a company isn't immediately identifiable and measurable outside of "hours with butt in chair" then said company is incapable of properly valuing its employees (the exception being a company that just wants to bill hours for a "butt in a chair"). It means the entire process is based entirely on individual perception. This leads to its own set of problems where individuals game the system to be perceived as harder working but in reality may actually be doing less work or a larger amount of trivial "busy" work. This is a failure and will only lead to a culture of resentment and game playing within the company.

There was no manager above at that point. I loved to do it because it was super efficient for me. You get into the office when some problems had already came up and people already had tried a bit of effort to solve them themselves. Then you just do rounds after lunch and fix them. Then after people went home it was a good time to review code and catch up on the personal work.

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