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That’s a factory environment. Totally different than an information technology environment. If i’m a programmer for instance, and can be just as productive working at home as I can at the office, then why not let me work elsewhere? And whatever hours I want.

It’s about productivity...getting done what you’re expected to get done. It increasingly doesn’t matter WHERE you do it, or how many hours it takes you to get it done. If you can bust your hump and crank out 8 hours worth of work in 4 hours, then why shouldn’t you reap the rewards of a few hours of free time?

And after 25 years of working in an office environment, the amount of wasted time I’ve seen from people who are supposedly “working” 10 hour days is pretty significant.

My boss sent me home with 1.4 million lines of C++ code. It came from SPARC Solaris on a Forte compiler. Code that was 20 years old. My task was to renovate the code and Makefiles so that it would build properly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 on X86 32-bit. I estimated 5,000 lines a day from some industry "fudge factors". Working at home, I ported all of it at the rate of 19,000 lines/day using my own computers at home. Nobody wasted my time yapping at my door or calling me into meetings. No time was lost commuting to/from the office. No time wasted for lunch. I grabbed a bite and ate the food in the time it took for another compilation phase.

That 1.4 million lines of code is part of a delivery of 2.4 million lines of code that includes C/C++/Ada/FORTRAN that is on the customer site now. Delivered with no defects reported by the customer. I'm sitting back at home for the holidays. My 3rd visit home in 2011. Less than 3 weeks home all year by New Year's Eve. Another porting task at home would be much nicer than having to rent a room in San Diego to keep going on the current tasking.

In my case, it comes down to required deadlines. The work must be done by date/time x, which is usually set by a third party. Missing deadlines carries severe monetary penalties to my customers and by extension I am liable for damages. The hours don't matter as long as it's done by date x. Usually a week, sometimes less. The size of the job always varies. I've done $100 jobs that took me two hours. Others took the entire week where I'm at my desk 15 hours a day from Sunday/Monday, rushing to finish and upload by 5PM on that next Friday.

Those harsh deadlines in my work are what repulsed me with the article, especially the parts further down about social media demands. I'm not only the president, but also the labor, and if I'm spending time on facebook during a deadline week, I'm in big trouble.