Huh? How many hours I work has very little to do with whether I can work from home. If I'm expected to work 60 hours/week and have the option of working from home for all of them, that's definitely still a problem.
Some managers (or even people hiring contractors) think they can get around this, but, ultimately, you can always do in 4h what they expect you to do in 8h and get paid for 8h. Not saying it's moral, but it is the reality. The conclusion is inescapable: working from home implies that the only important metric is the quality of your work (and the deadline), not how much time you spend on it. Because you can "simulate" one with the other.
Some people don't realize this, yet. Doesn't make it not true.
EDIT: PS: I'm talking about project where the "deadlines" are reasonably far apart and predictable. Say, no more than a few times a day. If your work includes being on-call and responding to incoming requests, that's a different story.
I can do that, but I won't. I value my integrity. So to me, it definitely does matter if I'm expected to work 8h as opposed to 4h, even if I can work from home.
My speculation had to do with believing that most IT employees, given this situation, would "work", at job related tasks, for over 40 hours anyway.
Personally, if a job that paid me for 40 hours a week expected me to work 60 for more then perhaps once or twice a year, I would quit instantly, so I've never understood the "mandatory 60-hour" meme.
Perhaps this is where our wires were crossing.
If this is a "nudge nudge wink wink we don't really work 40 hours when we're working from home" kind of thing, then why make the pretense of working 40 hours?
I value my integrity. When I say I'm working 40 hours, I work 40 hours. If "working from home" is implicit permission to lie about how many hours you work, then that creates a system where dishonesty is rewarded and honesty is exploited.
And if it's a "it's a little nicer to work from home" thing, then I'd say, not really. I would actually rather not work from home--my home is my space, where I can de-stress and do what I want. I currently work at a job where I "work from home" and I actually have an office I rent for myself so that when I go home, I'm actually not working.
The battles on extending days we're dealing with are things like getting pinged through HipChat because we're across 5 time zones and avoiding email at night, not forced extra work because you work from home. I'd ask some devs and designers from the team to talk about it but it's Saturday, so they're not working.
Folks are expected to work 32 hours per week, although if you get technical and throw in PTO and holidays they're actually expected to work 28.9 hours per week.
28.9 hours * 52 weeks ~= 1500 hours
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37.5 hours * 48 weeks ~= 1800 hours
37.5 hours * 47 weeks ~= 1760 hours
37.5 hours * 46 weeks ~= 1725 hours
37.5 hours * 40 weeks ~= 1500 hours
So even if you have 4 weeks off and 10 holidays, Treehouse still expects ~225 hours less work per year, or the equivalent of having 10 weeks off and 10 holidays at a normal 9-5 job with a half hour lunch. Treehouse likely gives 2 weeks off, 10 holidays, and 52 Fridays off :)
18 days (or 4.5 weeks) paid time off
1 week off for the holidays (in addition to paid time off)
https://teamtreehouse.com/jobs/at-treehouse-3b0b0839-71a0-4f...
My objection isn't to systems where there is a clear, honest expectation set. My objection is to systems where people say, "We don't give much time off, but you get to work from home a lot. Oh and we won't be able to verify if you don't work the 40 hours we expect, nudge nudge wink wink."
It sounds weird, but the latter is all-too-common, especially at startups.