And people say devs are not grounded in reality - how dare those fat car plutocrats force workers to show up at 9. What is this, the mid to late 90s?
Some sense of “fairness”? Because shop-workers need to work fixed hours, everyone should? You’re hiring developers to build software, not to be office furniture — do the exact hours worked matter very much?
When I have a week day off and see people shopping I always wonder who are all these people? I can't see everyone being off that day, the same day.
People who are not employed for whatever reason (housewife/househusband, between jobs, on permanent disability, medical leave, retired, on sabbatical, etc.)
People who work second shift
People who work third shift
People who work part time
People on call
Seasonal employees
People who work non-traditional schedules[1]
People who have flextime at work
Students who have late classes or no classes that day
[1] Examples: a friend who worked 12 hour shifts Fri-Sun but had M-Th off; another friend who works 10 hour shifts M-T and Th-Fri with Wed and the weekend off.
You can add tourists to the list too.
For fuck's sake HN we're talking about waking up and going to work. Most of us here are getting paid $100k+ (or twice that in SV) to type for a living. Stop trying to pretend your life is so difficult because you need to set an alarm, be presentable at an office, and work normal hours.
"People who are worried about the negative conditions at Uber shouldn't drive for Uber! It's not anyone's problem that those conditions are negative. "
But being present for a daily meeting during normal working hours is a pretty low bar to meet. Not everyone can meet that bar! That's fine. Not everyone can do every job. If you have some medical, psychological, socioeconomic, or ideological reason why you can't be present for a meeting from 9:00-9:10 Mon-Fri, it's not a violation of your human rights to suggest maybe you can't do whatever that job is.
Luckily I now work remotely, set my own hours 100%, and collaborate asynchronously with no daily synchronization points.
I could rush off to an office at the exact same time every morning... but why? It
If you're going to make a comparison, at least be honest about it. Plenty of software engineers work on mission critical software that can cost lives as well, while not all "shops", whatever you mean by that term, are life-threatening work.
If you pick a random software developer in 2018, they're writing forms over data web apps for a line of business application. It's a fluffy job with no real physical danger. That was my point.
Someone operating a backhoe for example might dig into a gas main, swing their boom around and crush or decapitate someone, swing it across power lines and electrocute themselves, etc.
Yes, mission critical software can kill people if it's not done right. That never happens because the developer was tired of a morning.
So, back at ya with that honesty bit.
Well, this is simply not true. I suspect you conjured that figure out of thin air. Case in point, the famous Therac-25 accidents caused by a software bug causing large over-irradiations of cancer patients : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Bugs happen, but with software you have several layers of safety checks to prevent them from becoming dangerous or fatal. A common one is having the code reviewed by one or more other developers. The odds of all those developers being unable to detect bugs at 9 AM are kind of long, wouldn't you say?
I also understand that you need to be in the right frame of mind to preform optimally, however if the people signing the check want you to come in at 9am then you adapt and overcome (your body will adjust), or find someone else to sign the check. If coming in early to code is the hardest thing you had to do today you're pretty lucky in life.
I don't think anybody is arguing that we engineers are not better off than starving children in Africa or soldiers who are forced to potentially suffer permanent harm from bad sleep culture[1], it's just being pointed out that due to the nature of the job, there's usually no reason to come in early, and there are reasons to come in late (health reasons)
[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/military-sleep-problems-research/
Backend service goes down? Welp, a few million people can't tweet, or view cat photos, or watch videos off YouTube for a bit.
Weld fails? There goes a bridge, or maybe an office tower, airplane engine, power plant, etc.
I’m not at all implying that they aren’t. However, because shops are open for fixed hours, it’s at least sort-of understandable that employers believe they can get more benefit from people working scheduled hours (which aren’t necessarily “first thing in the morning” — see sibling comment).
Regardless, “people are tired and miserable doing job X” seems like poor justification for making sure that people doing job Y are tired too.
It's the crabs in a bucket mentality. A child starving in Africa must mean you aren't hungry.
The truth is the difference is that I'm an engineer. If I was a machine shop worker I'd be on /r/machineshopworkers saying the same thing likely.
Before people accept a job somewhere they should find out the required work hours. If that doesn't match their ideal, then they should not accept the job.
The standup meeting is just a duplicate for ... reasons.
I thought I had to work 8 hours, but then I had a problem with my neck/shoulder that caused me to have to do an hour+ of physical therapy exercises at home each morning, and i started coming in to the office later in the morning like around 10 am.
I found that I could still get my work done and do well. I worked 10-5 all last year while taking hour+ lunches and still got promoted and everyone was happy with my output.
(Believe it or not, I’ve seen timecards in academia...)
What the hell does it matter??
If my employer says "you're full time, which means you work 40 hours a week" I can't just say "lol, I'm salaried, I do what I want, fuck you." nor can I say "lol, I get to choose my hours because I'm hourly, I only feel like getting paid for 30 hours a week, fuck you."
That's an extreme form of insubordination and it almost certainly means immediate dismissal.
I've had five software jobs.
But it really depends on the company, I worked in both scenarios. Sometimes I can't broker a better deal or find a better company and again, a good team or an exciting project may make up for dickhead management and their paranoid lack of trust.
("Enterprise" and "charging CLINs" are hardly the same thing)
It's not as uncommon as it sounds and I'm in fact fine with it, but by the end of the week I feel quite tired. I quit my current place but there only the employer firm had access to the card timesheet data, which felt wrong to me... it was a stinky company anyway. Too bad I'll miss the guys, the team was pretty good.
our core product is not software but mfg'd goods, so likely a carry-over from that mentality.
And yet I don't really ever observe devs or others suggesting that the sales staff isn't grounded in reality. I honestly don't think the dev team cares and would fully appreciate a salesman who said he would be able to sell better if he slept in till noon.