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Comment by navbaker | Hacker News Reader

This mention of "yoga at 11am" seems to be rubbing some folks the wrong way, but what if it was "lunch for an hour at 11am"? In all the jobs I've held (including now) where working hours are not dictated by external forces, such as customer service expectations, our teams make sure we get in our hours and are more or less available during a reasonable window, say 8am-5/6pm. It is pretty much understood that there will be 45-60 minutes of (unpaid/unbillable) downtime, which most people will use for lunch, but others will use for a workout, then eat lunch at their desk. I've never seen anyone actually work less hours because they went to yoga or for a run, they just use the time they would ordinarily be using for lunch and still hit their full workday, while gaining the benefit of de-stressing mid-day.

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Yeah, I don't get the unhealthy interest in other people's private life. As long as your job is to get work done, and not cover duty station at time xyz, complaining about when people choose to take a break is really weird and invasive.

In my experience people who are permitted flexible work schedules and take advantage of them tend to be the better employees.

He was complaining about his inability to schedule meetings because of the 11:00am spot. Even in the most flexible of environments, lunch is usually off-limits, 1:00pm is tricky because people can be late due to lunch and this 11:00am yoga essentially means a nearly 3 hour block with difficult scheduling constraints. I don't agree with a lot he has to say but this one kind of makes sense. Routing un-availbility at 9:00am, 11:00am and 3:00pm are, well in my opinion at least slightly uncool (one off's are fine ofcourse).

Sure but there are all kinds of reasons people couldn't make an 11am meeting, even being in other meetings. The only reason it bothered him is because the employee in question was doing something non work related.

Mostly don't you sit down with your team and figure out good meeting times and bad meeting times? Did employee say 11am is a great time for meetings then go get an 11am hobby? Then sure employee is a jackass.

And I had fellow googles spend all their day between PlayStation, gym, restaurants, cafe's, hairdresser etc... without getting any work done.

Wow, that's insane! My point of view is working at an east coast large research lab, that behavior here would for sure be noticed quickly and eliminated!

In my experience, jammed in an open office in a FAANG, shoulder to shoulder, with people talking loud for hours all around (not enough conference rooms, most do VC meetings from their desks), regular office hours were just for reading email, meetings, looong lunch breaks, loong coffee breaks and BSing with coworkers. Nothing of note got done 9-5 (well, perhaps "team building" did).

Any coding, debugging, thinking had to be done either after 6pm or on weekends, or WFH. Now perhaps you can see why people coast; not everybody is willing to sacrifice nights and weekends to be productive.

The actual problem is not them doing those things, the problem is them not doing their job

That's where the demands should lie, not on "bottoms on seats"

Surely being available for work meetings during working hours is part of "doing their job"

Google has a pretty chill work culture where I think a lot of people work < 40 hour weeks.

Most don't advertise this widely, for obvious reasons, but you see it mentioned occasionally in places like HN, or tech-focused subreddits.

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