so I am now a Project Officer at my university. Edit: despite the title, I am more like a developer. Doing C++ and QT GUI.
For the project, I have 3 reporting “officers”.
The first is my supervisor, a PHD. He came down and told me the other day, “Look, I don’t even care about your working hours, or even if you come down to work. I just want to see progress”.
The second is the boss of the lab, a certain professor. HR policy states my working hours is from 8.45am to 5.45pm. The professor seems to value punctuality, for he had made off-hand comments to some of the lab tech that we (the other PHD students) should be at work at least by 9am.
The third is largely irrelevant at this point, but he is somewhat like the client. No expectations on working style, but on the product
Hence the first two ‘bosses’ seem to be in conflict with each other, but the professor never told me explicitly about his expectations about working hours, and he does seem to more of ‘let’s get the work done’ instead of making sure we stay the hours (the PHD students come in around 11am sometimes - it’s hard to be motivated to come in at 8.45am like this!)
My idea: well, I guess my style would be do as much as possible, and when I feel a little bit under the weather, to come in later or go off earlier, but this kind of suck for discipline, and I know about human’s nature. If one could be lazy, why not?
Thoughts? Ideas? Comments?
Do you have a contract? Does it state normal working hours? If not, then I would go with the HR policy hours.
Look at it this way - working those hours is not going to get you in trouble with your supervisor, is it?
Without knowing much about the specifics of your work…
My first priority is always to “get the work done”. Having said that I like people to be at their desks for set hours for a number of reasons.
First and foremost I guess, is contactability. There is nothing worse than looking to have a question answered, get a progress report, discuss something and not knowing when someone is coming in. Yes I can call you on you mobile, send an email or whatever - but I prefer to do things face to face.
Secondly, and this might sound counter intuitive, but if you are working set hours there won’t be any recrimination. I may chase you to ask if you are using your time efficiently, but if hte project DOESN"T get delivered then I won’t be asking you how long you worked.
Thirdly, in the past when I have had subordinates, I like to know how long they are working - so that I know if their workload is too heavy, if I need to put more resources (or whatever) - not so much just to “clock the hours” but more from an employee well being point of view.
Fourthly, (and least importantly) regardless of whether or not the work is done, sometimes employees need to be seen by others to be working. It can cause unneccessary questions if other departments see you working so “little” (they may know what time you start, but not what time you finish).
The upshot? My default would be to work the “HR Hours” but have the flexibility to change it round if I needed to do something during the day, or wanted a personal day or whatever.
First, you have to be at least as strict as the strictest of your bosses. So ignore what #1 and #3 say: you have to keep #2 happy.
My advice: Work regular hours for at least several weeks until you can show that you’ve been responsible about coming in on time, and productive while you’re there. At that point, you can raise the issue with supervisor #2 about being flexible about your schedule. Ideally, you bring it up right after you’ve just stayed late a couple days to finish some milestone. (You should double-check with #1 as well, but it sounds like if #2 is OK with it, #1 will be too).
I think it’s going to be much easier to sell “flexible hours but always 40 per week” than it is to sell “I’ll come in whenever I want”, and it sounds like that might meet your self-discipline needs too. Particularly since it kind of sounds like you’re doing a long programming project, where the only limiting factor is the amount of time you spend on it. In that case, it’s not like you can every finish all your work for the day, and it’s very hard even to measure how much work you’ve done in any period of time.
Just make sure you stay on top of the TPS reports.
Ha, well, welcome to working a university. 
I know at the university I work, supervisors like yours give the HR office fits. Sometimes, these supervisors almost see it as part of their life’s work to give HR fits, but they are also willing to complain when HR can’t help them resolve a bad office situation of their own making. bengangmo has some great points, I have also seen situations like this complicated when the “come in whenever” supervisor is reassigned or is unexpectedly out of the office, and no one can find any of the staff.
I would come in on a regular schedule, but use the flex time when I needed to. I would make sure that I kept good notes as to what I did each week.
Didn’t you get the memo about the new cover page?
Stranger
This, PLUS …
Keep in mind that when you’re working in academics, the actual academics (professors and graduate students) are different from “regular employees.” Academics don’t have to keep “regular hours” except perhaps office hours mandated by their department. When you are staff rather than faculty/grad student, the rules are different. You can’t measure what you do based on what the grad students do.