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Comment by muttech | Hacker News Reader

That brings back bad memories of my first day at a new job. We had discussed in the interview that they were flexible with the time I got there. On the first day, one of the first questions I was asked:

New Boss: "So, what time will you be here every day?" Me: "I thought we had discussed that being flexible as traffic can be unpredictable?" New Boss: "We are flexible on the time, but you have to be here by that time every day."

I made it 6 weeks.

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This was the policy I implemented with my team and everyone thought it was pretty reasonable. It's basically pick your schedule, but stick to it. Otherwise scheduling meetings becomes unmanageable. That being said, I was also very clear about the policy during the interview process.

I'm pretty happy with this as well. I work 7-3, but I work those hours every day. I've walked out of meetings that have gone past 3 and no one has complained. It's been a great experience

Same here. What I did was creating an out-of-office calendar event for every day which basically blocks others from inviting me to late meetings. I stick very tightly to my schedule usually just +/- 5 minutes.

That makes sense. Employers save themselves a lot of employee dissatisfaction through honesty and transparency during the hiring process. If they misrepresent themselves, they end up with employees who aren't a good match as a result of decisions made on bad information, and who feel cheated to boot.

Edit: Some companies misrepresent their cultures because they know their actual behavior is unattractive to workers. Bolstering Glassdoor reviews by encouraging unusually satisfied (or otherwise motivated) employees is just another form of this. The strategy is successful at tricking employees into accepting poor working conditions while also demonstrating that the employer isn't worth trusting.

Core hours sounds like a more sensible policy to me.

Core hours worked well for me, until one office decided that their core hours would change due to high traffic. Suddenly an office that was only an hour earlier than mine was now leaving just after lunch. I had an office that was 11.5hrs off and we had a great setup where I would do night meetings one week and they would the other. The office an hour off of mine could never get their shit together to schedule meetings.

Core hours _should_ mean the core of the day, about 10 to 4, not whenever to whenever.

I agree. The worst part was one boss was in my office while the other was in the "one hour off" office. The local boss would get annoyed because I'd have to schedule something with the other boss who was already home when I'd get back from lunch. To "fix" the problem I moved my lunch back an hour but eventually that conflicted with local employees' lunch and meetings.

The way the place was run I was expecting one of them to suggest I just skip lunch.

Can people just log into meetings remotely? This seems to work fine for us, in any given meeting we have people physically in the office, WFH, working remotely, calling in from the road, etc.

I can't even remember the last time I had a productive meeting for work.

Everything that meetings at the places I've worked at, my entire life, should have been sent out in advance in /some/ format (today it'd be email) for review.

When you do that, you can also have a deadline for rounds of comments... 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, up to a decision deadline where whomever's allowed to make the decision can make their choice with all the views and objections/opinions laid out.

There's literally no reason to ever /actually/ have a meeting of the kind that I've been a part of.

“Ok, I see. Noon, then.”

"Not a team player"

Wouldn't it have worked to say "I'll be here no later than 11:00 AM"?

I actually responded with "Let's say 10AM then." That was "too late - we need you here sooner - how about 9AM?"

I had that happen as well.

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