this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
353 points (98.9% liked)
Programmer Humor
32069 readers
452 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
-
Ask for per-task time tracking
-
Get angry when you use round numbers in your time estimates, because "How could every task possibly take increments of five minutes?!"
-
Get angry when you use arbitrary non-rounded time entries, because "How am I supposed to determine the average time it takes you to complete a task when there's so much variance?!"
-
Gets angry when you spend an hour every day filling out your fucking time cards, because "You're not supposed to bill for that!"
-
Gleefully accepts absolute garbage work that you just subcontracted to Fivr.
I used to work at a place that required daily progress reports on tasks (this was before agile took off so 'daily standup' wasn't a thing.). So I wrote a script to schedule my git commits throughout the week (so that I had at least one a day), and every afternoon it would pull my git history, generate a summary, and email it to my manager.
He knew it was automated and hated me for it but I had the most consistent and detailed reports. On the upside, it really trained me to make good commit messages. On the downside It really instilled me with a strong "burn the building down" kind of vibe that persists to this day.
I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall "why are you billing half an hour a day to admin"
"Um" says I "working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we're tracking our work under takes at least that long"
Then management shot themselves in the foot
Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.
Step 2. Assign a "tiny" piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.
Step 3. Don't assign any other work to the team
Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later
So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.
Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount
I don't think it's fraud since it's billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I'm glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing
There's a certain dramatic irony in the effort to account for labor activity in the business making the actual process of work significantly worse.
Fuck detailed work logging. Best I can do is tell you how much time I spent per client in increments of 30mins.
Had a coworker do it in 2 hours increment, customer asked to have him removed from the project because even emails led to being billed for 2 hours.
Context switching tax
My company is very lenient with how I spend my time (as long as I'm somewhat in the office and get my work done, which I god danm do!) and it's absolutely amazing. Often before a big release I run out of work and since no one is tracking it, I can just work on optimizing/cleaning our code or fixing some UX issue. I mean what are people gonna complain about? Me not doing the work I already completed? If they ever start tracking us I'm jumping ship, our new team pushes out the best code this company ever had and if that's not enough, then nothing could be.
I'm also confused about this whole "constant meetings" thing. At work I have an analyst that does the vast majority of client communication for me. From how people talk about work, it makes me think "analysts" aren't a thing in other companies. My gf (also a developer) didn't even know what an "analyst" could be. Like seriously? I love that guy! Life would suck soo much without him. The only meetings I attend are technical or educational in nature. And our monthly team leader meetings, just because he wants to make sure everything is ok with us.
I actually liked time tracking. It’s when reality went out the window and my imagination took over.
Yep, absolutely hate that. It's this insane belief that there's no tasks to complete in a project which aren't tracked on a board somewhere.
And you're always left with this dilemma of whether they just want to be left with this belief and they're not going to ask why certain tasks took longer.
Or if they really want you to work as slowly as possible, spending 5 minutes each to document and track tasks which are done in 15 minutes.
Or if they're even more insane and expect you to just not do those tasks.
I've always been amazed when i get a new "seasoned" project manager and they try to really work on making all the tracking as efficient as possible so they have tons of metrics.
...and then nothing happens. We don't look at projects and tasks and figure out which work would be best for which team members based on past experience. We don't do any sort of optimization. We just track "velocity" and our estimates on release end up more dependent on how new the tech or the concept is (not knowing what we don't know) than anything else.