To me being on time is just a very basic low level requirement of being a professional.
As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. Turning up on time is a good way to show your manager that you can be trusted.
Edit: Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.
https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...
The argument made is that being a "good employee" and following the rules is a signal to your employer that you're willing to make personal sacrifices to be dependable - the implication being that someone who follows the rules almost all the time is by necessity sacrificing some part of their personal interest.
It's just that, though - managers want dependability as much as they want competence, sometimes more so. This may or may not be good for the company depending on the company. If the leverage of each employee (in terms of their ability to affect the bottom line) is small, then dependability is far more important. If the leverage is high, then the employee's results dominate - the employee can come in whenever they want wearing whatever they want and say anything they want, as long as they make it rain.
That is not a judgement, not everyone can effect the bottom line and it is not guaranteed that everyone finds themselves in that position over the course of their career.
But, if you have a manager who keeps telling you what a big effect you're having (perhaps to justify a lower salary or discourage a move to a new role) but also gives you flack for coming in late, it should shine a light on the truth as to how they see your role.
It would be nice if the employer was giving symmetric signal to be a dependable party that will not throw you under the bus for a mildly controversial statement nor lay off at first financial bump.
The worst metric.
That is, unless the "turning up on time" is actually causing a serious and recognizable problem. Then it's the problem that's a problem.
>As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways.
No it doesn't. If you put the onus on the developer and say "not only do you have to deliver high quality code you have to make me trust that you've delivered high quality code by adhering to these arbitrary metrics I've come up which bear no intrinsic relationship to how you do your job" you're admitting incompetence as a manager.
It's a manager's job to know whom to trust and a manager that trusts the useless developer who turns up at 9am sharp over the excellent developer who turns up at 9:05am requires termination.
>Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.
It will definitely make a bad manager trust you less.
A good manager will either recognize that you're delivering or not.
And a great manager will evaluate the wider effects of your behavior on the whole team and over a long timescale. If you being late to your job causes others to start doing the same, and if your manager cuts you slack because you are a "high performer" then social dynamics come into play that must be...well...managed! Performance also slips over time. People get spoiled, sometimes depressed, sometimes lazy.
Managers look at whole teams and long-term trends. Stop focusing on yourself and the immediate moment. Success is a marathon, not a sprint, and requires careful, regular progress.
You're missing the point entirely: Who cares if they're also late?
Short of them being late to something important like a meeting, it seriously couldn't matter less than any of the thousand other things you should focus on as a manager.
Unless you work in something with external time pressures (e.g. I used to work in equities and US market hours dictated our need to be available) there's no reason it should matter whether someone shows up at 9 or 9:45. If you're really worried about people missing each other, set core hours (11-3 say) where everyone's expected to be available.
If they also are producing and not causing other people problems then I see no problem.
However, if they are not producing then that is a problem. However, if they are coming in on time and not producing that is exactly the same problem.
The point is that one problem is unrelated to the other.
>social dynamics come into play
Social dynamics always come into play but in this instance, they really don't matter. If a manager knows how well everybody is performing and is communicating that then these other intra-team dynamics you are talking about simply don't happen.
It seems to me that you're coming at this from the perspective of a manager who fundamentally does not understand what they are managing and isn't cognizant of who is performing and obviously isn't communicating that because they don't know.
Because that's exactly when you would see the intra-team dynamics which you're describing will happen. That is what happens on most software teams, sadly :(
>Success is a marathon, not a sprint
I never said or implied that it was anything else.
>Stop focusing on yourself and the immediate moment.
I am focusing on neither.
I am beginning to suspect that you are exactly the kind of manager I'm talking about here. Hi.
While manager slept.
> The worst metric.
Not really. If your job is to be available to others (IT support is a good example), turning up on time is an adequate metric.
Yes, for IT support type roles I think measuring online availability as one aspect of job performance is legitimate.
A person who believes this would say that if according to policy my best employee should work 9am-5pm, but he prefers to work from 7am-3pm and is my best employee, it is the policy not the employee that needs changing.
Personally, I always try to get to the bottom of this stuff during job interviews - nobody wins if the employee assumes there will be flex-time and the company doesn't allow it!
I'll be honest, I was surprised to read this sorry if environment still existed for programmers
Until I got hang of a manager and I asked what is this nonsense. He told me, he used to work as a manager in real industry and really really cannot comprehend why programmers "whine" so much about this. All his workers started the work at exact 8am so that the parts quota of the day would be achieved. I got no comment and after two weeks I just resigned...
When you let people run wild, you end up with angry people anyway as gold-brickers will always take advantage of the system. Communications and accountability break down as you can never have all parties involved in a matter in the same place or same phone call at the same time. I've worked in places where people get wacky because the guy who supposedly works 6-2 really is around from 8-1.
now tends to only exist in mismanaged large teams
Getting "work done" is fairly easy to recognize - you can tell when bugs are getting fixed and features are being delivered and when they are not.
Getting work done to a high standard and delivered at an appropriate speed is, I think, only recognizable by another developer who is as good or better than you.
>Personally, I always try to get to the bottom of this stuff during job interviews - nobody wins if the employee assumes there will be flex-time and the company doesn't allow it!
Yeah, that's one of my red flags during interviews. Companies that are strict on this type of stuff are essentially advertising the fact that management is clueless about what development does and rely upon intrinsically meaningless social cues to build trust. Like suits.
Bob closed 20 tickets this week, and Dave is still working on that one ticket from last week. Who got most work done this week?
What is on time? On time for what exactly?
Is he missing any meetings? Is he working fewer hours? Is he doing less work? Is he impacting a colleague?
Why do you consider something that has no relationship to the posters job to be a basic requirement to being a professional?
So sometimes I would need to ask him something, and he wasn't around - that would hold me up. Sometimes other people would need to ask him something. He wasn't around, so they asked me instead - usually when I was trying to get in the zone.
I am all for giving staff flexibility but it should not come at an expense to productivity.
Regarding turning up on time and professionalism - For me the main component of professionalism isn't trust but respect.
Demanding an employee arrive by a certain time may or may not be a good way to run a business (up for discussion), but, once you as the employee have agreed to do so then consistently being late is a sign of disrespect. Part of how I would define professionalism is doing what you have agreed to do (or making a good faith attempt, even if not possible). If you still think it's unreasonable, consider if your employer paid you a couple of days late - is this still ok?
A lot of the comments mentioned what they consider to be attributes of a good manager, but only from their perspective as someone being managed. To me a bad manager would be someone who allows a centralization of knowledge in one person, so much so that that person can start to behave in a disrespectful manner (YMMV).
Some programmers have the attitude that they are indispensable and can behave anyway they like. There is a certain irony in the fact that we optimize/destroy other peoples jobs for a living but don't consider the possibility that it will end up happening to us - other professions are not as forgiving of some of the behaviours we might consider normal or fair.
Please let me know what you think (lessons on grammar also welcome).
What I'm reading here is that you're perceiving it (perhaps accurately, perhaps not) as a threat to one's dominance as manager.
I think you may be using the word respect as, say, a capo would - as in, "respect the chain of command" or as cartman would say "respect mah authoritah"!
If true, then that signals a certain level of insecurity over one's position which I think may be an unfortunate signal to send. As an employee I would see that as weakness, especially if combined with technical incompetence.
>If you still think it's unreasonable, consider if your employer paid you a couple of days late - is this still ok?
It's funny, an employer actually asked me that in my first job and I shrugged my shoulders and I said I probably wouldn't notice, which was an answer that clearly infuriated him.
He later fired me (a real blessing in disguise), and the last chunk of pay actually did come in about 4 days late - something I was keeping a close eye on because I was concerned he may not pay me at all. I am absolutely convinced it was him being spiteful - he did payroll himself and there was no other reason I could see for it being late.
I had a good chuckle over that one.
>Some programmers have the attitude that they are indispensable and can behave anyway they like.
Often it's because they are and they can. I mean, nobody's indispensable of course, but the nature of what they do means that they can create (or destroy) a lot of value and don't have much of a reason to fear termination. This tension between that and managerial refusal to recognize it because it signals a threat to their dominance has, I think, been the result of a lot of self destructive behavior in this industry. A lot of people would rather feel powerful than keep a healthy bottom line. Their prerogative, I suppose. It's good to recognize this and point it out when it happens though, because, for instance, as a shareholder I wouldn't want to be bullshitted about what went down.
I think you should read this:
https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...
By his definition, you think programmers are "too free", no?
I can certainly see how you could interpret my remarks on disrespect as "perceiving it (...) as a threat to one's dominance", but this was certainly not my intention.
My context is of never having had a 'bad' manager, they have always been agreeable and pleasant with a good technical understanding and (I can only assume) high self-esteem.
I think I have used the word respect in two slightly different ways: one when describing employer/employee relationship and one where describing manager/managed.
When I talk about disrespect in the context of a manager I mean it on more of an interpersonal relationship level, not as a struggle for dominance in some sort of power structure.
> "...As an employee I would see that as weakness, especially if combined with technical incompetence."
Adding the bit about "technical incompetence" sound to me like you are projecting certain other attributes on the hypothetical manager that we are discussing. What has been your experience with managers?
> "It's funny, an employer actually asked me that in my first job and I shrugged my shoulders and I said I probably wouldn't notice, which was an answer that clearly infuriated him."
When you have few bills to pay and/or other obligations then this attitude is fine, but I think for a large group of people (e.g. with families to support) this would be a real problem.
The point I was trying to make in the paragraph about "programmers acting any way they like" was that this may be an accept/successful strategy in the short term, but it may not be optimal long term. However indispensable you are now there is someone somewhere out there looking to optimize your job or make your skill set irrelevant. It's certainly possible that you are the exception and that no one will be able to do this to you, but I don't think that it applies to the majority of people reading this thread (I know it doesn't apply to me).
It seems like you view the employer/employee relationship in a very adversarial way, rather than an optimal way for both parties to get something they want. I have had jobs in the past (mainly part time service worker type jobs) where I feel that this attitude is valid. However, most companies I have worked for as a programmer have been small/medium level and started/funded by the same people (no VC money, no faceless career CEO or public shareholders). In these situations I have found that there is no calculated malice or attempt to 'enslave' you, just a few motivated people putting their own money and future on the line to try and make something of value and better themselves.
> "By his definition, you think programmers are "too free", no?"
No, I think a lot of programmers think that they are "too free", but are in-fact only "short term too free"
Most devs are "round the clock" employees even though their job doesn't explicitly say so. If a serious production crisis happens at 3:00AM, all hands are on deck.
