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Do we need defined work hours any more?

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.

2 thoughts on “Do we need defined work hours any more?”

  1. 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

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