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"Rebecca Stevenson" <rstevens -at- atg -dot- com> wrote in message news:89921 -at- techwr-l -dot- -dot- -dot-
>
> > You are paid to be available to SMEs, artists, writers, editors, etc.
who might have to ask you a question at 9:00 am or 4:00 pm, and if you're
not available when *they're* available (IOW, during those standard office
hours), you are delaying *their* work. If you can do your work in 25% less
time than it takes everyone else, good for you. Use the extra time for
training (yourself or others) or defragging your hard drive or some other
useful pursuit.
>
> Just to advocate for the devil for a moment - this argument wouldn't work
at my current company or at many other software producers, which have no use
for "standard office hours" unless you're actually a receptionist. People
straggle in and out at all hours from what I can see. I'm used to a
"standard" day and will probably stick to it when feasible, but I seem to be
an exception around here. :-)
>
While that's true, most places have "core" hours where most, if not all,
people who work in the office are generally there. For SiliValley places,
I'd say those hours are typically 10-4 or 10-5. I know few engineers who
start before 10 (although one I worked with a few years back told me he got
up at 4am one morning and started working on his own computer before he came
in to the office a few hours later), but most I know work well into the
evening rather often.
More important that the "core" hours is that you're available for the
meetings you need to attend. I had to do some early (for me) meetings at one
place recently because one person on the teleconference was participating
from England, where it was the end of the workday there.
Yet while teleconferencing may work at times, I don't think it works as well
for development meetings, where problems are resolved and bugs are tackled.
--
--
"[Programmers] cannot successfully be asked to design for users
because...inevitably, they will make judgments based on the
difficulty of coding and not on the user's real needs."
- Alan Cooper
"About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design"
Chuck Martin
twriter "at" sonic "dot" net www.writeforyou.com
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