If a collaborator seems to strongly weight punctuality, especially to the point of making little remarks about stochastically late arrivals, that makes me not inclined to work with them because it signals a lack of perspective about what's really important (like good ideas and good results).
You get a job, you check the bus schedule...there's a bus that drops you off right outside of work at 8:50.
That's pretty reasonable imho.
However, fairly regularly the bus is going to be 5 minutes late...this may cause you to be exactly on time..maybe a minute late.
Also fairly regularly the bus will be 20 minutes late...causing you to be about 10 minutes late.
Rarely it will be even more late, but not very often...probably about as often as a commuter gets stuck due to an accident or something.
Is it really a big deal to be 10 minutes late sometimes for an unavoidable reason?
I could see if you had to relieve someone, but again..let's get real. Most HN readers probably don't HAVE to be at their work exactly on time.
Buses generally run about once every 1.25 hours...even upt to every 2 hours.
Is it really fair to ask someone to be at work 1.5+ hours early every day just so they are not occasionally 10 minutes late?
The problem is with PT, you have basically 0 control over things. If you are driving a car, you can listen to traffic reports, avoid congestion, drive faster, take shortcuts. With PT you are completely stuck.
This is not a contrived example, this is based on what I have seen with Public Transportation and people using it to get to work. Unless you live downtown or in a city with excellent PT, you can find yourself in this dilemma.
It's easy to write it off as avoidable, but it seems silly in my book to advocate going through a huge hassle just to avoid being a few minutes late.
Obviously if it is critical that you are there at a certain time, that's a different story. If I'm a surgeon who needs to be on call 24/7...taking the bus is not going to cut it.
I'm also not saying we should give carte blanc to people to show up whenever they want...
However it's something that really depends on a lot of things.
There are a lot of things that can cause a person to be late, are most of them preventable and avoidable? Yes, but the effort may not be proportional to the benefit,
I honestly think these days showing up exactly on time is disproportionately valued.
It's definitely a factor, but it's one of many and if someone is a little late but good elsewhere I don't think it's a big deal.
Then I suspect that you would not fit into the "professional" category as defined by the OP. (That's not to suggest that the OP's definition of the word is the only appropriate one).
This reminds me of an idea I had for a product: place value on your and your colleagues time by creating a market for it. The market runs in the calendaring application - you are allocated a certain amount of everyone's time to take for meetings. If you want or need more than your allocation, you have to trade for it. That way you are forced to invite only the people you really need, it quickly becomes obvious whose time is most important, the overall amount of time spent in meetings is limited, and people become cognizant of the "value" of others' time. It could be built as an outlook plugin, even.
no link handy, but a similar thing was tried with email before. You had to offer points for someone to read your mail, and readers would natutally read the highest-paying emails first. The results sounded cool, similar to what you were predicting-- everyone got more conservative with others' email-redaing time. With the email version, you "traded points" by reading (or replying? I forget) your mail.
How a person prepares for erratic transportation schedules is an indicator for professionalism.
This as someone who as walked 2 miles in drizzling day-after-Thanksgiving rain to a job interview 25 miles south of Boston by train (they hired me, job did not last, couldn't pay me enough).
I don't think much of this thread is relevant. If somebody gives me a time to be somewhere, and it leads me to complex avenues of moral debate over the impact on my professional career and the opportunities in life for my children, for less than a kilosecond, then no.
Are they on time for work? Good. Are they late? Did they prevent or ameliorate that having an impact?
Will they execute what they say they will, when they say they will? We may have to wait on that.
I don't mind my employees being 10 minutes late one day and 10 minutes early the other. I understand that, with variances, you need to shoot for the mean.
I was late to an interview once. I could have blamed public transport, but in reality is was poor preparation and planning that caused the issue (forgot to take a map and tried to work on memory). I'm not talking 5 minutes late, I'm talking over 30 minutes late. It's the only time I've ever been late for an interview in my life.
They still gave me the job. I was uneasy about this at the time, but accepted. It was a bad choice, and I was a bad fit. The fact that they brushed off this bad mistake without mentioning it should have been an indicator to me that any amount of sloppy mistakes would be tolerated by their staff. And thus it was proved so.
One-off lateness can be the result of public transportation. Consistent lateness isn't.
Now, when is punctuality important? I don't care about 9 vs. 9:30 when getting into the office. I do care care about perpetually running 5 minutes late to a 15 minute team status meeting. There's an unspoken agreement at play; Meetings are short when people show up on time, ready to listen or speak.
