Interesting article over at GigaOM about structured vs. flexible work time. Here’s an excerpt:
Flexible work is something that seems increasingly popular with programmers and other online workers, for reasons that Zach Holman of the software repository GitHub described in a recent post on the GitHub blog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman said that for most of the staff who work on the service, there are no defined working hours whatsoever — everyone is on their own schedule and they work whenever they need to in order to solve the problems that need to be solved. As he puts it:
Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved. Code is a creative endeavor… We want employees to be in the zone as often as possible. Mandating specific times they need to be in the office hurts the chances of that.



I agree with this completely. We run our company on this principle. I also touched on this idea in my recent article “Dibs!” about IP creation and protection.
Kevin
Same here. And having to commute to an office every day? Is that really necessary?