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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.

Isn't that the employer offering a foot, and the employees gladly taking them up on the offer, to the mutual benefit of both? It's not like they're helping themselves to a pocketful of pens and a spare monitor on their way home.

> I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.

I'm glad that's working out for you, but the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week.

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> the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week.

I totally get this sentiment but for me it's really nice to choose crazy work hours if I want them.

This is important. There's a backlash right now against companies that _demand_ such work hours, which is totally understandable.

But - some people _choose_ to work at 2AM. They could be people still working at 2AM after starting at 10AM (I hurt for those people, but to each their own) or they could be people that started work at 9PM after a 6 hour break from working from lunchtime to 3PM.

Such is the beauty of the remote-working culture. Working at what some might consider "crazy" or "unhealthy" hours might actually be the result of having a healthy work-life balance, spending the "regular" waking hours with your family and enjoying life.

An interesting aspect that gets sidelined in a discussion involving flexible hours is the undeniable observation that the nature of work requires 'sprints'. Not in the agile context but as in physical running context. Software development happens in bursts trying to fit it into the assembly line model of fixed working hours and repetitive tasks just shows a gross misunderstanding of how things get built in the software world.

The sprint analogy is especially true when you consider that units of work in software development can very often be neatly itemized into JIRA tickets.

I feel bad for those people. Unless it's their company, and they have a major ownership share, there's pretty much no reason for them to be putting in hours like that.

From my perspective, I think there's an unspoken balance that can be struck between the different sorts of coworkers. We're a relatively small team, for example. 5 people. 2 have kids, four total are married, making me the sole (and young) bachelor. Most live far from the office and telecommute, coming in a couple times a week, whereas I'm in every day.

So a balance is struck - I'm here in the office the bulk of work hours, and I'm fucking uncontactable after 5 or on weekends because I'm living a young bachelor life. The other guys are available during the day but by definition not as online as me, but if something comes up after hours or on the weekend, generally one of them will be around and can pick up whatever the emergency is.

Maybe it's because we're a small company with a good CEO but things just kinda "work out" with unspoken agreements here. I hope I can emulate this in later jobs.

True; if I didn't have the kid, I would love, love, love to work on a much later shift. At work, I usually don't really feel like I'm ready to dive into something until afternoon; and I've spent many hours coding away on personal projects after the kid goes to sleep at 8.

The only problem is that it ends up not being a choice. Once you start working those crazy hours, they're going to expect them, even after you "choose" not to work at 2AM.

"they" do not need to know when you work.

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