Reflections on hours

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This will be old hat to some of you, but hey, I'm running into it for the first time.

Having spent 14-odd years in civil service and the career-type people that tends to attract (i.e. ones that stay and grow roots, deep roots), coming to what's effectively a startup is a major culture shift. One of the more distinctive changes is in the hours people work. We work on what I'm calling Startup Standard Time, which is in at 9am or so, out by 6pm or so, mostly.

Also, I'm one of the oldest people in the company, which is a shock. At WWU I was the youngest for my entire career there. At my older job the only people younger than me were some of our helpdesk techs.

At both prior jobs there were people who were at the office by 7am. At WWU that was my office-mate. At the earlier job, it was a couple of people, some of whom were rarely arrived later than 6:30am.

At WWU, my arrival at 8:10 or so made the the late-arriver on the Windows side, though it ties me for the earliest arriver on the Linux side (2 of the 3 on that side of the office generally got there about noon and stayed until 8pm).

Here, I don't think anyone is there at 8am other than the person who answers the official phone. The one time I got there at 8:45 I was the third one in the office, and one of the other two had clearly just walked in. And yet, by 9:30 everyone is there.

I suspect some of the early arrivals has to do with the impact of children on the sleep cycle. Once kids reach the age where they have to be at school by 7:30am (if not earlier for extra-curriculars or "zero-hour" classes), it makes parents get up earlier as well. As it happens, the transition from High School (up at ungodly early hours) to college (no longer in the house) means that, well, you're still getting up early even if there is no reason for it, so may as well go to work and get home early.

Also, arriving at 7am means you can leave at 3:30pm, which should be in enough time to catch the kid's sporting events without having to take vacation time.

Some of my co-workers have kids, or are working on having them. None of them have had 'em long enough to get to High School age, or even sporting age, yet. At WWU, three of my six co-workers had kids, two of whom had at least one child in the process of hunting up college or going there already; unsurprisingly, they were both early-arrivers. The third had just spawned child number two, and bossman may have had grandkids already so we ran the whole range.

The late departure also means we're eating dinner later, much later than normal. Still getting used to that.

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heh, re the late-lunch thing here in Spain we have it worse: we go for a full 2 courses + dessert + coffee lunch at 14:00 or 14:30 .

There it goes our productivity :-(