Ask HN: "Send people home at 5." Was this part of Re-Work to be taken literally?

7 points

15 years ago

My last post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1468545) was a lightning rod for valuable commentary and I learned a lot from this community. I, along with my business, have matured considerably since (and in some ways because of) that post. I'm hoping this post will spur an equal amount of interesting debate on this forum and hopefully less haters of the poster.

In my copy of the book (http://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310709764&sr=8-1), the section in question is on p. 258. The section seems to be pretty serious about exclusively promoting an office environment that closes up shop at 5 PM. Given that my team's average arrival to the office ranges from 11 AM - 2 PM and average departure ranges from 6 PM - 2 AM, I'm put in a bind here. I'm trying to reconcile the advice I received from this forum in that post and the advice in this book.

In that post, the community overwhelmingly encouraged flexible (and self-selected) hours for developers if at all possible. It was possible and I made it happen. Everybody got along better respecting each other's own selected hours rather than being forced to conform to uniform working hours.

The book does point out some interesting side-effects of long hours such as "it lets you get away with lousy execution" and "you don't need more hours; you need better hours". I can say that both of these are valid statements given my (limited) experience. While I initially felt that self-selected hours were better across the board, I'm now starting to have second thoughts on the matter.

To me this begs the simple question, should this 1 page chapter be taken literally?