All my mates who are builders, or work in related trades, start work at 7 AM. They most certainly don't get paid a million bucks to do so.

Most my mates who are artists, designers, writers and scientists love working late at night... See? The argument can easily go the other way around. Builders, bus drivers, farmers, etc., all have to start early, and that's understandable.

Our field of work (I suppose most readers here are IT professionals) never had to normalize fluctuating schedules until relatively recently - when our profession has become fashionably decentralized.

And I think we need to be careful and make sure that harmful practices like having too many meetings or mandatory meetings at odd hours have not become a norm.

Programmers don't create things and solve problems at meetings. Most of the time, the meetings are there for other people in the business.

The author meets a collection of friends at 7am because a later time conflicts with taking his kids to school. Friends, not co-workers.

The first sentence of the article is "There’s a collection of friends that I have a standing videochat with every couple of weeks."

Well, I read it off my phone at 7AM. My brain interpreted that as "a daily standup at 7AM".

I guess it illustrates precisely why it's a bad idea to have meetings very early in the morning.

Some people like that, because they can leave earlier.