Expecting programmers to problem solve for 8 hours is stupid

You are right: expecting software engineers to problem solve for 8 hours a day is counterproductive. As a software engineers' manager I expect my subordinates to problem solve 24 hours a day, including weekends and holidays.

This is not a fugure of speech, this is how creative mind works. When software engineer is banging crap out of the keyboard - it is not a problem solving, it is writing down a solution.

Before writing first line of code an engineer should have the whole structure imagined as a draft and a particular module/section - as clear and real as if we can touch it.

Now, working hours is a matter of comminucation. The time when the software was written by individuals is over, today's business-valued software is written by teams. To be a team, group of people should communicate. Most effective type of communication is face to face, next best thing is videoconferencing and it is about 3 times worse in terms of information shared and remembered. It's a pity, but it is fact. So team of software engineers should meet face to face a lot, and this is why we are working in offices, have some mandatory hours (like 11 to 17), and have so many meeting rooms here :)

The last, but not least question is discipline. I've met people who can churn out problems' solutions at a constant rate regardless place, daytime and even climate and timezone. Those are rare brilliants. Most people left to themseves would beclome less productive, it is another sad fact. Office hours and teammates is a best known work motivation to date, order of magnitude better than hefty salary, stock options and money/stock-bound KPIs.

Now to you, if you don't mind. Thru my career I've met about dosen of engineers who asked for more relaxed hours and/or (part-time) remote. It never worked out as a productive boost, just more pain for me to control and motivate those lads. Most of the time they were just plain tired and/or unhappy, but thought it was something about they commute routine or office aura. It was always symptom, not a cause.

I believe you are just tired and/or unhappy too. We are living in times when being a skilled software engineer means ability to choose company, product, location and team to be bouncy sparkling ball of ideas every morning. If you are not this ball, ask yourself - why?

> loosing motivation

Did some textbook publisher take "losing" out of all their spelling books 15 years ago? I see it misspelled more often than spelled correctly these days.

> I can sort of understand why people confuse 'lose' and 'loose' due to incorrect spellchecking, but 'loosing' isn't even correct English.

Yes, it is.

“loosing” : “loose” :: ”losing” (the verb form, not the adjective) : “lose”

If you understand mistakenly using “loose” in place of “lose” you should be equally able to understand using the gerund or present participle of “loose” in place of the gerund or present participle of “lose” (or the identically-spelled adjective), with the same single-“o” insertion transforming one valid English word to another.

> Did some textbook publisher take "losing" out of all their spelling books 15 years ago? I see it misspelled more often than spelled correctly these days.

I blame the emphasis on phonics over memorization, since “losing” has the “o” pronounced in a way more typical of “oo” and phonetically differs from “loosing” only in having a hard rather than soft “s”.

> If you are in an org that actually lets people work great flexible hours you won't advertise it too much, for fear of attracting workers whose primary goal is to slack, or getting a reputation an org of slackers.

This reminds me of: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

The common idea is that if there is a norm that everyone follows, and you visibly deviate from the norm in some direction, it will disproportionately attract people who extremely care about that direction, even if you only wanted a minor change.

The difference between working 8 hours a day and working e.g. 7 hours a day is not that dramatic, but if all jobs require 8 hours and you are the only job who requires 7 hours, then all people who want to work as little as possible will run to you, because you are the best option available for them. But you didn't want the people who want to work as little as possible; you wanted people who think that 7 hours is appropriate. People who believe that 7 hours a day are best would have been happy at your company, but instead you will be full of people who would actually prefer to work 4 or 2 hours a day, and while your offer is better than the alternative, they will still be unhappy. So instead of getting happier employees, you will actually get less happy ones.

If instead the job market offered the full spectrum: jobs with 8 hours a day, jobs with 7 hours a day, jobs with 6 hours a day... and perhaps even jobs with 1 hour a day (with proportionally smaller salaries, I suppose), then offering a position that requires 7 hours a day would attract exactly the people who prefer to work 7 hours a day, no more, no less. Unfortunately, this is not the current situation.

And I have no idea how to get from "here" to "there". The incentives seem set up so that anyone who moves away from the current equilibrium gets punished. (And in a parallel universe, where the norm is 9 hours, or 7 hours, anyone who moves away from that equilibrium gets punished.)

Also, if people pretend to work 8 hours a day, but they actually work 6 (and spend 2 hours watching cat videos), then if you say you want to work 6 hours a day, people will assume it means 4 hours of work and 2 hours of cat videos. Why shouldn't they assume you are just as hypocritical as anyone else?