Short answer: you should be around for at least 4 of the "normal" working hours.

Long answer: I'm a programmer/sysadmin/networking guy/general hacker for a small start up in the Bay area. Having moved here from the east coast from my last job, i've come to enjoy the freedom that people in out industry get in California. My job is very leniant; I come in anywhere between 9am and 2 pm most days, and stay at least 9 hours. There's two kinds of days for me: doing my work, and fixing other people's work. The former usually involves writing tools to automate the latter. The hours after 6pm are valuable to me, since i can usually get more done between 6-9pm than i can from between 9am-6pm. With no questions/meetings/lunches/etc to do, my mind can stay focused on one particular task. And there have been months where i stay 6 hours behind most of the other employees here. As far as raw productivity goes, this is great for me. But one of the best parts of working for a small startup is the people involved in everything. There's amazing enthusiasm coming from all sides, and regularly burning the midnight oil kind of keeps me out of the day-to-day loop in my companies operations. So i've found that making sure half of my day is available for corporate "normal" business hour stuff has helped me stay a part of my company, which in turn is probably a good tradeoff .

Although i do despise traffic. Taking the 101 from San Francisco to San Mateo and back during rush hour is one of the most ridiculous things that millions of people do everyday (other than buying boy-pop-band cd's, but that's a different thread). So the only request i made was that i'd never be required to come to work during peak traffic times..

The nicest thing about the industry out here is that if there's something you want that your company won't work with you on, there will be 10 other companies out there waiting to give it to you :-)

BlueLines

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