Ask HN: "Send people home at 5." Was this part of Re-Work to be taken literally?

Maybe if you're successful you can write your own business book, promoting what happened to work for you as business advice with "clarity, even genius":-)

You should come up with a catchy buzzword, say "time-distributed". "We're a time-distributed team, and that has lead directly to our success because ....".

On a more serious note, it's good to see you resolved your problems and are making progress.

Also, may I suggest that instead of focusing on top-down business principles you should be more product and customer centric and design your dev process around these aspects of your business? If your product or customers require x of you and your staff, then do x, otherwise don't. Deciding on office hours or how many office hours staff should work without a rationale risks creating bureaucracy and a sense of arbitrary decision making.

Based on the description of your workplace and if you want to follow the advice, it could be "Send people home after eight hours," because it looks like you have people regularly working 12 or more hours. Of course, that is easy to do in industries where the work is creative and the project is done when you run out of time.

Salaried compensation facilitates overwork because the feedback loop doesn't contain measurable consequences until staff get fed up and quit. But it doesn't have to be that way. If you want a feedback loop which forces management to take a real interest in long hours, put everyone, including the CEO on hourly compensation - I have a friend whose architecture firm did that years ago. They maintained very high retention through the construction boom when job hopping was common and salaries were rising because people appreciated the inherent fairness and management was able to add staff appropriately.

Good luck.

However, just because you are 'the business guy' (to quote your previous post) doesn't mean you have to micromanage trivial details like hours of operation. Rather, I think that your role should be more big picture - figure out what customers want, how much they will pay, and how you will reach them.

Finally, this is not intended to be an insult, merely my own opinion. If I were your co-Founder, I would be looking to jump ship and do something else. In my experience, nothing kills morale faster than micromanagement. And nothing kills a startup faster than killing morale.

1) Distracting work environments. One person commented on your last post and advised you to read Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, so I won't tell you to do that. But be aware of it. A door that closes, quiet neighbors, few meetings.

2) Guilt/determination. If a programmer for whatever reason is having trouble making progress during the day, but is dead set on shipping, they may stay up late to try and make it up. This is a good thing for you as a stakeholder, because it means they care. It's a bad thing because something is holding them back. Usually this thing holding them back is some repeated obstacle that drains their willpower. That can be a variety of things: bugs when you have bad debugging tools, figuring out how to do something without quick-feedback access to documentation/expertise, running tests when there's a twenty-second compile cycle that has to complete first, working hard to add a new feature and then losing it because your computer freezes and you don't have version control, etc. Note that 1)is actually a subset of this, as it's "getting your brain ready to code only to have it interrupted often," but since you can probably control 1) directly I gave it its own listing.

#2 can be hard to tackle. How are you supposed to find better debugging tools as a non-technical business guy? And how are you then supposed to go about telling your tech cofounder how to do his job? I don't know what the answer is. Likely it's that you should buzz off and go do customer validation or whatever. But maybe not.

In general, I agree with Rework on the early-to-work-early-off-work schedule, but the way to achieve it is to figure out the reasons the night owl thing happens and address them, rather than to try and force everyone in the 9-5 bucket. Shape the peg to the hole, THEN put it in.

There are pros and cons to anything. Just make sure you have your eye on the prize and not on some proxy for it that you think is what is needed. In other words, if someone is putting in long hours to get the job done because they aren't staying adequately focused, work on the focus piece of it rather than on a specific time frame to work in. And don't forget that we are all human and no matter how much you do right, sometimes someone will be short of sleep, under the weather, distracted by a personal issue, etc. If it is short term, just be tolerant and supportive. If it is chronic, work with them to try to resolve things (or, if intractable over a long enough period of time, consider letting them go).

Different people work best in different conditions. Developers are often introverts and will tend to not be real happy campers when having to be surrounded by people and putting up with their chatter and general distraction. My ex and my youngest son are both seriously introverted and we homeschooled. I was the family extrovert. My computer area was in the middle of a high traffic zone where everyone could interpret me to talk to me. I handled it fine. The two extroverts had desks in secluded corners of the apartment where they could turn their back on the world and also shut the door. So if you can arrange the physical space the right way, that might resolve the need some people have for quiet and solitude in order to focus. And this is not just a personality thing. Some types of work need some certain environments to be done well. If you can't arrange the physical space to be adequately quiet when all hands are on deck, then letting the developer stay late is a timing option to address this issue.

In short, I think you need to do more analysis than what I see in your post. You need to know more clearly what the problem is and you need to think more broadly in terms of what your options are for addressing it. This isn't necessarily just a question of "flexible schedule or fixed schedule".

Best of luck.