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> And somehow the entropy always flows up to supervisors. At 0400 (4am) Sunday morning I took over a watch from my boss. All the junior people are at home enjoying their flexible work schedules while the two senior people on the team end up covering the long shifts nobody else wants.

This hits home for me. I briefly worked at a company that tried to allow infinite flexibility in working hours. The flexibility quickly became a tool to avoid meetings and be conveniently unavailable whenever work needed to be done.

Like you said, it falls on a few people to get the work done after everyone else has flex scheduled their way into only being available at odd hours. Managers were afraid to drag people back into work or force specific working hours because the employees could complain that their managers weren't allowing flexible schedules.

It eventually turned into a mix of some people who were working all of the time to get things done and other people who were almost never working. Then it was abandoned.

It's much better to have some core, overlapping work hours that everyone is required to attend unless they have special circumstances (doctor's appointment, for example). Then let everyone choose flexible working hours before or after that time. Infinite freedom is too ripe for abuse at scale.

With the meeting issue a good mid-way a company I worked for had in the contract hours were flexible but we expect you to be available 10-2. This mean late risers and early leavers were both covered + in a way limits the day of meetings larger companies tend to progress to.

Also we need to recognise flexibility relies on good work ethics. Its great when your in a well hired and motivated company, but you know some companies it going to be a tool to slack off. I've seen both sides on that one where it was a great vs if someone was marked 'remote' you knew everything was going to take significantly longer.

I think a good middle ground might be recognising most white collar work more than contracted office hours, so going back to 4 days might actually take us back to a 40 hour week. I think an alternate is govt to set rules and enforce the 40hr week. Make the 40hr week responsibility of the business and overtime much be paid or they need to get you about the door or return time in lieu. Maybe an exception for salary over $400k type thing or whatever fairly high amount as you want senior managers getting out the door too for the example it sets.

My concern about the 4 day week is many people are financially struggling so does this just encourage 2 jobs to be more common and the 4 day week ends up leading many people to 7 day work weeks? So in a way I wonder if better enforcement on the 40hr week is the better option in practicality as much as I like the idea of a 4 day work week for society.

Ironically the military is one of the worse places for usage and wastage of time.

There is tons of accountability for some stuff ("How much diesel did you put in that jeep?") but very little for people's time ("Let's have 300 infantry here an hour earlier than necessary before an event, even though it costs X per hour per person for them to be standing around doing nothing.)

It's also the same around some safety stuff ("Everyone wear a reflective belt going on a run") vs time base safety stuff ("That platoon has just been on exercise and barely slept for 72 hours and everyone is now driving home.")

Don't get me started on the overall wastage the military spends on talent management. Doing an extremely expensive and complex course that takes a year+ to complete? Cool, you might often be actually fullfilling that role for one/two years max afterwards before your moved on to next role doing something different elsewhere.

The key here is that military members are salaried; the situation where they are told to stand around for x hours doing nothing changes nothing financially. It might make the people upset, but what can they realistically do? No show is punishable more strictly than a civilian speeding ticket, AWOL is potentially akin to a DUI or murder charge. And it's rare! Why is that? Because the vast majority are indoctrinated? Or because they truly believe? Somewhere in between? What makes it work (because it does work, usually)?

Without getting too political the underlying answer, in my experienced opinion, is not "I have no choice" but rather "this gives me something to do that matters" even when it isn't "what I want to be doing right now."

The fact that they’re salaried doesn’t matter. It’s still costing the government x dollars an hour for people to stand around doing nothing when that time could be better spent.

In fact I’d say if you were actually paid by the hour, you’d probably see less of this type of waste.

You're in the military and you can't call "Bill" in for a meeting? This is not how I picture the military. I was under the impression push comes to shove, if your superior says you have to be somewhere, you _will_ be there, regardless of what its for.

In reality there are far fewer "orders" given in the military than in the civilian world. That ability is held in reserve. When people are stationed in places they might not want to be, often away from family, they dont want to hear direct orders on a daily basis. And remember too that everyone has multiple bosses. If everyone throws around direct orders then soon order A will conflicts with order B and the system starts to break down. They best way to keep everyone's respect is to issue as few direct orders as possible, and then only after extensive consultation with impacted parties.

Yes, I had that impression too. If my memory is right, that's how Reagan broke the Air Traffic Controllers' strike: many of them were military reserve members, and so Reagan fired them as civilians and then recalled them to active military service where they were subject to the UMCJ.

Looking at Wikipedia, I don't think that's right. Even civilian ATC had no right to strike. Reagan highlighted their oath not to strike, threatened to fire anyone who continued to strike, and then did so, dismissing over 11,000 controllers and banning them from future ATC work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

Yeah, odd idea.. do they also stop shooting at the enemy at 17:00:01, because "Sorry boss, I'm off the clock?"

I dont know how deeply sarcastic this is, but peacetime military does not function like in war, with the disparity being proportional to how far away a unit's peacetime routine diverges from war.

Sometimes...

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/no-more-9-to-5_swiss...

;->

Interestingly enough I've been in exactly the opposite position. The management wanted really rigid working hours but me and a colleague managed to negotiate almost full flexibility because I have a chronic sleep condition and he was dealing with family issues including having to take a child to medical appointments at all hours of the day.

Weirdly, we seemed to do almost all the work despite our weird schedules - in fact, I found it incredible just how unproductive developers and engineers with 20 years experience could be despite putting a very solid 9am to 5:30pm, five days a week.

The one constant is that supervisors and some co-workers were often annoyed because we weren't on hand to talk to people interrupting our work with questions that 9/10 times could have been easily answered in a quick email or message (and often that we would have been able to answer even when we weren't in the office). Either that, or technicians would be annoyed how long they'd waited for me to come in so I could fix a "software problem" for them in a system being built in the factory - which I would usually end up tracking down to being a faulty cable or a problem with a manufacturing process - all things that was their job to find and fix and that they were qualified to diagnose!