Ask HN: Always late to the office, is this OK?

I am a 21 year old node & web developer working for a small company in the suburbs of large tech city in the US.

Since sophomore year of high school I’ve developed a habit of running five minutes late to most commitments I make. It’s a deep set behavior that I seem to have no grip on.

I like the office I work at. I’m underpaid, but it’s comfortable and low pressure. I think this is partially because I get along well with my boss and partially because he knows I could go work anywhere else and make more money.

The only expectation the office has is the one I can’t meet, showing up on time. Today I showed up at 9:06 and was told to go home for the day, and to come back on time on Monday.

Are there many programming jobs with more time flexibility that would fit me better? Is running late OK in the industry? Or should I be trying to fix this ~6 year behavior of running late? Has anyone dealt with similar issues?

Thanks HN.

You could go work somewhere else with more flexible hours and still have problems because you're always late to work, late for meetings, late for calls. You'll still have trouble with partners, your family, their families, and acquaintances because you're always late for dates, late for planned events, late for family gatherings. Some people won't care, but some will find it disrespectful and think less of you for it. It's a habit I would break for personal reasons.

When your time is unscheduled it's not a problem. When you're scheduled to be in a meeting, or working with someone, it's disrespectful and potentially expensive.

If you never work with anyone else it's not a problem - all that will matter is getting stuff done. But when you work with other people it will be a problem. You will get the reputation of being unreliable, and a reputation once acquired is almost impossible to shift. Even devs end up interacting with other people. If you're any good, people will start coming to ask your opinion on things. If it's noticed that basically you're not there when you're expected to be there, you will get a bad reputation, even if you think that ass-in-seat time is irrelevant to getting things done.

And you may think it's unfair, but a reputation for unreliability in turning up on time will spill over into an expectation that you will be unreliable in other matters. That's how things work.

If you freelance or contract and fail to meet deadlines then you will lose clients, contracts, and money.

So it's entirely up to you. People under 30 have a much more relaxed attitude, but ask whether they have the wide range of experience necessary to make a nuanced decision about whether this is important. And will you only ever deal with people under 30?

I wouldn't have made you go home, but I would think twice about trusting you with anything important. If you can't show the discipline to be at work when you're asked to be there, how can I trust you with other aspects of self-discipline?

Added in edit: A lot of other commentators are saying "asses in seats is a dreadful policy" which is true, or "Provided you get your work done, who cares?", which is true. But once you are a member of a team, even if you don't formally interact with people in the code you're writing, you still have knowledge and experience that other people might want or need to tap into. If you're not there, you're depriving them of the ability to interact with you. Interactions in a team are not limited to formal meetings and formal pairings. In the best teams, it's the informal interactions that are the hardest for management to understand, the hardest to foster, and yet give the greatest rewards. If you're always late, you can break that.

On the one hand you can say it's an overreaction.

On the other hand meeting commitments is a pretty basic life skill, and probably one you should learn. It is no harder to be places at 9:00 than it is to be there at 9:06. Being late often signals to the other people involved that you do not respect them or their time. Whether that is true or not, whether you mean to say that or not, that's the signal that is received. It's even used in power games, where the more powerful person intentionally makes the other person wait for no reason.

In my opinion, the punishment doesn't fit the crime. A simple warning, written or otherwise would have sufficed.

With regards to your own habit of being late, to echo what others here have said, it is something that you should fix. At one point I fell in to a pattern and I was constantly late for everything, it took a concerted effort to fix it and I think it was quite necessary.

Generally, being late is seen as disrespectful and an inability to keep your word. I've had people in my life at certain points who would show up up to 20-30 minutes late for some events. At that point I was too rattled by their tardiness to even want to interact with them. I am sure the same can be said about others towards me when I fell into a habit of being slightly late for everything.

Take yourself out of the equation and think about how your behavior makes others perceive you.