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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

I was 5 minutes late to work every morning, because of taking my son to school in the neighborhood where our new house was being built. I didn't want him to have to move schools in the middle of the year.

Boss said "This won't do. You'll have to examine your priorities."

I thought about it all day, that night. Next morning I got to work (5 minutes late), went in his office, said "I examined my priorities. Work is #12." and I left.

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Assuming you were effective at your job, said boss needs to examine what is important to him, slavish respect-mah-authortai-style following of rather arbitrary rules, or having a "bird-in-the-hand" competent employee who gets shit done (perhaps 5 minutes later than the boss-man would like).

It is kind of sad how many boss/manager types still fail miserably on this point, and then complain about not being able to hire "good people".

I'm the counterexample - I like letting capable people as loose as possible, and more often than I'd like this backfires. I'd appreciate some effective pointers on how to deal with this issue.

I've done some freelance stuff, and I'm currently doing a PhD where my time is very much my own to manage. Consequently, I've got some experience of being on the other end: being left free to my own devices, and occasionally having that backfire.

Things that I think are important:

* Give some small but significant (~week-level) milestones, ideally with tangible results. Then discuss these.

* Check up with the worker. Not by asking vague questions about how things are going, but specific questions about stuff that interests you in their work. I once worked on three projects at once for a place. Two of them were going very well, but one of them was going very slowly because I was kind of stuck. Getting input from the boss on that one really helped -- but I'd never have asked him about it, because I reasoned he'd hired me so he didn't have to worry about it.

* Help with any other stuff on their plate. Family issues, money issues, personal issues, etc. Obviously, you can't solve most stuff like this, but you can usually help. I once delivered a contract very late due to getting a wrist injury, and being unable to promptly see a doctor.

* Try to keep a dialogue going about work. Whether you're happy with their performance, whether they're happy with your pay/conditions, etc. Crucially, if any of the above ideas seem like overkill, you'll find out about this, and dial them down accordingly.

I have to deal with this too. Some people appreciate the freedom to come and go as they please and they will enjoy working. Others take advantage of the situation and don't accomplish their work. Dealing with the later can be frustrating if you are trying to create a comfortable, flexible workplace. If you warn somebody and they repeatedly can't get their work done, then you have to fire them, or risk losing your good employees. Good employees will justifiably grow resentful of always picking up the slack.

One idea that I use is - set your own hours. But then please adhere to your own schedule. If you want to start at noon, that's totally cool. But, actually start working reasonably close to noon. If your schedule changes, that's cool too. But let me know what that is and, again, adhere to your own schedule.

Getting uptight over being 5 minutes late is not really necessary in my opinion unless it's for an important client meeting or something.

What's backfiring?

There's two levels here: at the first level, you don't want to sweat anyone (capable or otherwise) about coming to work late because it indicates fundamentally messed up priorities: you aren't paying them to keep a seat warm. If you set them free to come in whenever they want, they will. If it gives you indigestion because you have no idea where your employees are, you need to figure out why that is and solve the real problem (and if the real problem is "my boss thinks I'm not doing my job if I'm not sweating my employees about seat-warming", my condolences, because you are totally fucked).

Don't confuse this with people who advocate self-management, where you just trust your people to do the right thing and set them loose without any structure at all. That's a much more subtle skill that requires the right relationships and the right situation and frankly is a gigantic hassle. If you've got a group of unmanageable geniuses who seem to be productive despite the chaos feel free to try but most teams who get things done do not operate this way and don't let the woo-woo peddlers tell you otherwise.

You're doing pretty well if the people who work for you feel like you have real, specific expectations of them but also have 'wiggle room' to do anything they want (just not everything they want).

Focus on results and not on some measure of what you think leads to results. If an employee is always 5 minutes late, but they always complete quality work on time, then why bother? Your time is better spent focusing on the employee that is always on time producing mediocre work.

When someone, especially a junior, is new to a project, make sure they get oriented to it. Don't just say "I'm always available if you have any questions." Because being able to take a codebase and a bunch of (even well-written, which it probably isn't) documentation and navigate it from the start without help is a skill that they don't really teach in school (at least not at MIT).

Without being oriented, they won't know what questions to ask and then after a week of slowly plodding through the code trying to piece things together, will be too embarrassed to ask.

You only need one metric: is the job getting done. Everything else is a distraction.

How do you measure that?

My team just took tons of heat because there was a complex performance issue that needed our full attention. We clearly communicated that we would need a large chunk of time to solve it, and while we tried to stay responsive, a lot of stuff had to just get ignored for a while to be able to make any progress on it.

We're finished now, and what we did will eventually save the client literally months of time over the long run, but because we weren't constantly placating the people who wanted to see the job "getting done," we put ourselves at risk of losing the contract.

All's well that ends well, I guess. We finished the task, and now we're back to churning through the high visibility low-effort issues and everyone's happy again, but all of those small issues combined don't have as much impact as the big task we just finished.

One strategy is to consider establishing a success metric as the first step to every project. If you can't design a measurement for success/failure, maybe you shouldn't be doing that project.

This is the one point that I keep re-iterating to the teams I work with. If you can't define what a success is move on and do something else where you can. It's very easy to get caught up in interesting stuff 'just because' but if it does not contribute in a measurable way then it's just another distraction that you should avoid.

Managing a client relationship is very different than managing employees. For managing clients I like over-communicating status while hiding my internal processes as much as possible to allow for a little bit of bullshiting when needed.

This is correct, from my understanding cultivated sternness happens not by being that way by default but by being so lenient at several different moments in your past that you were strictly taken advantage of until you could accept it no longer and you had to be strict or mean.

Then the first time you decide to do so all every one ever sees is "Oh this guy is really harsh, what a jerk".

Such is life. I'd LOVE for pointers on this.

I would imagine some flexible middle ground? Like a number of hours you strictly have to be in the office per week, but outside general availability time (10-14) they can choose when they come and leave as long as they fill their quota.

I meant the sterness vs niceness balance as a life thing.

Are you sure the working relationship with the people "this" has backfired with wouldn't be strained anyway, even without the loose rules?

I'm fully aware there are people who are "smart" but don't "get things done". However (though I am lacking any rigorous data to back this up) my suspicion is that people in this category who are prone towards taking advantage of employers are going to do so no matter what and being lax about strict attendance rules won't have a substantial impact on it.

IOW, just because they are (forced to be) present from 9am-5pm or whatever the defined working hours are doesn't mean they won't spend most of that time fucking off on reddit on their personal cellphone or whatever and they would have been problem employees whether or not the rules were loose -- if anything I suspect having loose rules makes it easier to identify when someone is not pulling their weight because there's a lot of ways to appear really busy to others while doing nothing when you're actually physically present.

And whats the end of the day metric to watch? Whether work is getting completed on time. If results are slipping or not up to the standards you are set, then there is a problem. If there is not, and communication is not suffering, then there is no problem, except the possibility that they may be bored or unmotivated and have the possibility of leaving.

There's a balance, and where that balance falls depends on how responsible and aware your team is. If you have a team that fully understands the business and product implications of what they're doing, then they can have a lot more free reign. If you have a team that just wants to write code and is allergic to thinking about anything that isn't code, you'll need to provide a lot more direction and guidance.

But there are very few scenarios where "you're five minutes late" is a sane thing for a manager to complain about. If you have someone with a consistent pattern of slacking off, that's one thing; if you have someone who is showing up five minutes late, but is otherwise a good employee, then just back off.

Or, at the very least approach them from a perspective of "is anything going on that I could help with?". As in, is there a way work could be more flexible to make things easier for them?

In what way does it backfire and can you specifically focus on that?

Even assuming you weren't effective - why would anyone care? At all?

Unless you are heading to a meeting instantly or opening the store or whatever, why does 5 minutes matter? Why does 10 minutes matter? Even 10 minutes every single working day shaved off would be <= 2% time lost. It really is negligible.

You're not going to suddenly turn around your productivity by adding a few minutes to your work day. Most of us spend more than that making coffee.

I can absolutely see this at an investment bank, or at a job where physical presence is mandatory (such as a security guard, a teacher, or a bank teller). In a creative job like software, it's absurd. Especially when so many places say, "Come when you want".

A major reason for a lack of WFH is due to a manager's inability to manage WFH - these are people that have only been taught how to keep people on task, and have to physically view your body in order to know what you are thinking and doing.

Many of us are well acquainted with the indirect communication from ticket systems, email, and other sources of social noise. We're used to managers who can take a collection of tickets and email, and deduce what their reports are doing. But many people are unable to do this, or untrained.

And since they are taught to be suspicious that you're stealing from the company (as all mediocre managers are) they mistrust the tickets, email, and other documentation you create.

This isn't even WFH, the person just wanted to drop their son and come to office around 5 minutes late. If you can't handle 5 minutes of delay in some one coming to office, I would deduce you must be super bad in building long lasting relationships with people. Who takes some one to task on coming a few minutes late?

This lies at the heart of the problems plaguing our Industry. The people doing the direction and management are nothing more than glorified email routers. Often who got lucky, and got promoted and now simply try to maintain their positions through command and control.

This stuff is chronic in service, many production, and similar, mostly hourly, jobs.

They really don't do relationships with people. They just want the cogs to mesh, the stuff to get done, etc...

This assumes that the managers know the details of the employee's jobs too. This gets less true when you become a general manager. But there's a big difference between "I'm managing your time" and "I'm managing your result" which the General Manager is on the hook for.

If you don't know the details of your employees jobs, you know their skillset and their ability to deliver results even if you don't know the techniques they use. If you're even slightly clever about communication styles it can work fine, although it does mean that motivation must be treated as a thing that should rarely waver. The more mature and skilled the person is and the more trust you have the less likely it is to cause issues.

Then why bother with an office at all? We have discussions here about remote work and private offices disrupting team communication, but if your team isn't all in the office at the same time I don't see how that is any better.

I like coming in the office to be honest. I prefer face to face communication and also usually am much more productive at work than at home. I think it's just easier to get into the mood when I'm at my desk at work.

Also, even though not everyone comes in at the same time usually there are "core hours" where everyone is expected to be in the office. At my last job this was from 10-3. I don't think it's too unreasonable for a team to be able to find some time when everyone can be in the office, especially when it's only a few hours long.

Of course, this could all be simulated as well if people had work environments. Still, I find face to face interaction much better than trying to communicate online, even with video chat. Maybe it's just about finding the right software to help, but I find being able to talk at the white board invaluable.

> Also, even though not everyone comes in at the same time usually there are "core hours" where everyone is expected to be in the office. At my last job this was from 10-3. I don't think it's too unreasonable for a team to be able to find some time when everyone can be in the office, especially when it's only a few hours long.

I don't think it's unreasonable, either. In fact, I think it's necessary to run a successful business with more than one person. However, it's not "absurd" to have some definition of late or to expect some consistency in when particular people arrive. That said, the original described case is overly and unnecessarily rigid.

Physical presence is still valuable. But strict times for creative jobs are less so.

There's a lot of space between "Don't be 5 mins late" and anarchy. My firm is "10-5 is encouraged, but there's some flexibility, and be available early morning or late night to accommodate customers and employees in other locations."

"Come when you want" sounds pretty close to anarchy to me.

You're assuming that people prioritize anything above work. I work at a "come when you want" company and I always aim to have at least four hours of overlap with my team, even though we have a seven hour time difference.

I think you mean "prioritize everything". I am not making that assumption. I am doubting the general ability of teams to self-organize as you describe, even though some teams can do it.

Teams certainly need the flexibility to adjust their organization in order to best accomplish their goals. Most of the problems with large corporate bureaucracy come because someone up the chain wants to impose control by dictating how every group organizes.

However, at some level there needs to be a team of people working together to accomplish goals, and that team needs a program to get with. Now, if all that is meant by "come when you want" is that each team is free to determine what their own program is, then I misunderstood the point being made and my original comment on it does not apply. There does need to be some sort of accountability, though, or the team dynamic collapses. In the context of a company, this has to be integrated with whatever policies the company as a whole has.

In my experience, teams will figure their programs out very quickly by themselves, so this hasn't been as big a problem in practice for me as one would think.

I'm pretty sure that would result in people coming sooner and leaving later, because they dont want to be seen as "that guy that abuses the system"

Same issue with unlimited vacation time.

As a contrarian view, I kinda like the strict schedule. Lets face it, you're going to have to suffer thru primate dominance rituals. This particular dominance ritual is well understood and easily worked around and isn't all that painful and usually isn't very punishing. What I'm getting at is the alternatives for the boss to throw some weight around and show who's boss are generally worse than a mere schedule.

"Oh, so that's your game. Well, I know it, can play it, can play it well. Bring it on."

Of all the situations to invoke the famous quote "Thank you Sir may I have another" I feel the best with a simple schedule.

Calling an Industrial Age invention a primate dominance ritual is insane.

I don't think that's the parents meaning.

There always have been and will be dominance rituals. Some would have been physical fights, but in modern office culture punching subordinates is seen as unacceptable - but some people still need some dominance rituals - and picking a fight over "do as I tell you and turn up on time, thus demonstrating I am the dominant one" is pretty tame stuff compared to a silver back ripping your ear off.

Making the argument that those two behaviors, management insisting on punctuality and violent bodily mutilation, are commensurable is the exact kind of insane thinking that I am criticizing.

It's the motivation that is the same. If you haven't seen it in action you're either very lucky, or not very observant.

Yes, but going back to the parent's point, while you may think it's instinctive to have a dominance trait, the "come on time" rule is only there probably because the manager's superordinate instilled it in him. I guarantee you we are not going back to our primate roots when we wake up and get to office, and OP might be thinking this in too much of a literal sense.

No. It's not the same motivation. Human hierarchical social behavior is not the same as other primates. It's much more complicated and in most human situations social status is based on a constellation of intangibles rather than who can literally rip the other's face off.

> "Come when you want".

Except for anyone who does daily standups first thing in the morning.

We do that. And attending via Skype is perfectly OK.

By left, I assume you mean left the job completely?

As interesting as a story this is, is it really the only reason you chose to leave? Did you enjoy the work and did you try and negotiate at all? I don't mean to criticize your prioritization but the decision seems a little impulsive given how you described it. As you mentioned you gave your priorities a lot of thought, but what about the decision itself?

I worked at a small startup like this once. The boss/founder came from a non-software background, so he was used to expecting everyone in the office by 8 am. The way I explained it to him was "You pay me to think about the software, and solve the problems. I do this not only in the office, I do this in the shower, I do this on the way home, I do this on the way to work. Now, is it more important for me to be thinking about the performance issues we are having while I am drinking my coffee and walking to work, or do you want me to be preoccupied and stressing about being 5 minutes late so you do not yell at me?"

That made him think for a bit.

I work at what the owners call a "15-year old startup" and they're very strict about being on time for the office hours. And the reasons you cite (in the shower, while commuting) are among the reasons they pay us salary. We're expected to work a small amount in the evenings and weekends as well as our 40 hours during the week. Our management uses the excuse "Well, it's the tech industry, we all work extra."

Left unchecked employers will use all kinds of BS to extract more hours out of their employees.

Being expected to 'work a small amount in the evenings and weekends' is ridiculous if you're not being compensated for that.

Hm. That's the difference between salaried and hourly.

This is major bullshit. "We all work extra" can be translated to "we're all shitty at managing our time, and so you must be too"

Wow that is somewhat surprising. I work at hedge fund, what one might consider a fairly stogy industry, and nobody cares when I come in to work, which is 9 or 10 usually.

What time do you usually leave? In my experience people will come in at 9 or 10, but then work until 8 or 9 pm.

8pm would be a late night for me, I try to leave at 6pm but sometimes a bit later.

Do you really want to work for someone who thinks getting to the office 5 minutes earlier is more important than your child?

There are many jobs (though largely not office jobs) where you HAVE to be on time, where not being on time seriously throws a lot of scheduled things out of whack. It is not unreasonable at all in these professions to expect someone to always be on time, and get rid of them and find someone more responsible if they cannot be. One good example would be all of the elementary school teachers I've ever known; they NEED to be at work at their start time because that's when they get a roomful of children handed over to them. Being habitually tardy or unreliable in any way is completely unacceptable.

The friction here is probably from someone used to working in one of the job fields like this coming into an office environment where your hours aren't as relevant as the quality and volume of your work.

I will say though, I was a lead developer at my last job and I had some issues with an employee (with two young kids) not putting in forty hours a week, and he wasn't otherwise making up for it either. He'd be the last one in and the first one out, and it was problematic because he was supposedly the senior developer on the team but he was not meriting his higher salary. In the end I suppose you could say the real problem was with his output, not his hours, but they did seem like interrelated issues.

I would argue in this case that people simply need to plan a bit more around the inherent frailty of humans.

You can have supply teachers on call. Or you can pay them a bit extra to arrive early and mark work in that time. (e.g. make the actual working day 5-6 hours; other hours used for marking, planning, etc). There are other solutions.

One that sticks out in my mind is that when I used to work retail, our hourly pay stopped when the store closed. Obviously you don't and can't leave then. The last customer is slow, you might need to lock up, etc.

In most cases, all you need is for management to actually think about these issues and to not allow the quest for margins to result in abusive practices.

When you're a contractor then yes, you are The One, you have chosen and need to be reliable. When you are part of a massive organization with profit in the billions (e.g. a supermarket), it really is a deliberate choice they are making which results in stress being loaded on you.

Did he do architecture? Design? Mentoring? Its not all about the hours. A manager, for instance, was probably paid higher than anyone in the group and didn't do any code.

It's not that they think work is more important than your private life. They want you to think that work is more important. This peculiar brand of totalitarianism is popular in startup-land, hence the beer outings every damn Friday.

Does he know that's why I'm coming in 5 minutes late? Maybe he just thinks I'm a slacker who doesn't want to get out of the bed in the morning. I think I'd rather try and explain to him the situation I'm in before walking out. He's probably doing it out of ignorance, not out of malign. You can talk to him about it and explain your side and maybe understand his.

Right now you're making the same kind of judgements of the boss as he is making of you.

It's a pithy story, I wouldn't take it 100% literally.

I find this kind of attitude so dismaying - I am an employer, and I find myself in the inverse situation - practically physically dragging staff away from their desks to ensure they spend time with their families, and live their lives - work is work, not life.

Mad props to you!

Your ex boss is an idiot, if he thought that putting you on the spot over 5 minutes was the right thing to do in that situation.

It's your boss that should review his priorities. Does he want clockwatchers or productive and happy employees?

What a douchey boss.

He was young (as was I), and trying hard to be a good boss. Married but no children, short on philosophy and long on business school theory.

I admire your empathy and that you evidently examined the situation versus reacted. Props to you.

Ditto. Empathy is important...I imagine that boss, if he's relatively young, has to deal with the pressure of seeming like an effective boss, and that includes setting some hard lines...because let's face it, the boss and employee can see eye-to-eye, but that understanding doesn't always communicate across all the other employees, leaving some resentful. It's not dysfunction, necessarily, it's just the nature and friction of having an understanding and an implicit agreement. And so having a hard-no-compromise rule is sometimes easier. And younger bosses do worry about not wanting to seem like a slacker millennial (to their bosses)

Age is not an excuse for being ineffective at your job.

Sure it is! Otherwise how do any young people ever get started?

You're conflating age with level of experience.

I immediately judged your boss as a crappy person, which might or might not be true. May be the work environment made him like that. I can't say. But my first reaction was intense dislike for him.

Oh man. I love reading stories, knowing I will retell it many times. Cheers!

Been there done that. They only grow up once.

I'd have just got up 5 minutes earlier each morning.

Why not just leave 5 minutes earlier?

> Next morning I got to work (5 minutes late)

You showed him!

edit: No, absolutely. Leaving 5 minutes earlier is _not_ an option. How dare he.

He was dropping his son off at school. There's a limit to how early you can do that. Leaving home 5 minutes early won't help if the "issue" is the commute between school and work.

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