This was the bane of my existence when working in a larger corporate environment for 3 years. We used some SAP product that was written in 1995 using all of the best enterprise methodologies. It was slow, dumb, had obtuse validation rules and required all types of duplicate entry. I hope to never implement such a thing in my own company.
Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#12In my experience only incompetent managers ask you to account for your hours for anything other than hourly billed client work. The best projects I've worked on had: * A manager who was technically literate. * The tasks were documented and specified clearly. * The project plan was prepared by a knowledgeable planner and thus realistic. * Our weekly progress meeting focused on addressing the delay causing stumbling bl…
> In my experience only incompetent managers ask you to account for your hours for anything other than hourly billed client work.
And the government. We recently started selling to the government, and now we have to report our tasks and hours. Every two weeks has to have at least 80 explainable hours.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#13In my experience only incompetent managers ask you to account for your hours for anything other than hourly billed client work. The best projects I've worked on had: * A manager who was technically literate. * The tasks were documented and specified clearly. * The project plan was prepared by a knowledgeable planner and thus realistic. * Our weekly progress meeting focused on addressing the delay causing stumbling bl…
I have recently got involved with a client building a reporting web app on top of legacy applications. I ended up telling them that there were too many uncertainties and we would need to do this on an hourly rate. Just about wrapped up but still not clear to me whether that was a better but it did protect me when I ran into messy error prone data in the source systems.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#14Honestly, just take off if its bothering you. Anybody who has options is going to leave situations like that.
I worked at a place where the management tried to implement something similar. All of the main engineers left within about 2 months. They missed their big deadlines and over the next 1.5-2 years the rest of them (including management) lost their jobs. The product was sent off-shore and kept of life support for the remaining SaaS contracts. It was really quite sad to see something cash flow positive sink right to the bottom over something like that.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#15I had to do it with one client. My philosophy is one of automation and never doing something twice - the less hours the client needs per unit work done, the better - and the philosophy of some of their managers was the opposite, that you didn't get what you paid for unless people sweated for it. In other words, they incentivised their own workforce and consultants not to automate anything. So I made a read-only log,…
The problem with automation is, that everybody wants to be the benefactor.
So people who can't automate feel cheated by people who can.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#16We're a product company. We track time, but only so we can plan our sprints better. We do estimates as a group using planning poker, which has the added benefit of fleshing out (and limiting) scope.
Our minimum unit of trackable time is 30 minutes. This helps us recognize how expensive context switching is.
Most importantly, each member of the team is only allocated ~30 hours per week to allow for all the nonsense that has a tendency to pop up.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#17In my experience only incompetent managers ask you to account for your hours for anything other than hourly billed client work. The best projects I've worked on had: * A manager who was technically literate. * The tasks were documented and specified clearly. * The project plan was prepared by a knowledgeable planner and thus realistic. * Our weekly progress meeting focused on addressing the delay causing stumbling bl…
This would be the best place any of us had worked.
Considering the audience for HN has not only developers, etc. but also management/entrepreneurs, it would be handy for lists like this to be compiled from Ask HN comments so that they could reference it and try to be better managers.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#18If you like the job and want to stay there a while, I would suggest also keeping a tickler file of your accomplishments. Refactor a particularly nasty bit of code and everyone went "whew!", write that in your tickler file. The reason is, if they mention anything negative about your time in your next review, you have your tickler file of accomplishments as a way of demonstrating how effective and productive you really are. Sure, it's more work and nobody who matters likes to toot their own horn, but it is best to keep data on your accomplishments. It makes writing self evals easy. It makes writing your resume easy. And, it makes sticking up for yourself in reviews[0] easy.
Likely, however, they are not really going to say anything. Some managers are old school and simply feel collecting time on everything is the way it's done, but end up doing nothing with the data because they're lazy.
[0] On the subject of reviews. If you ever walk into a review and have no idea what is going to be on the review, your manager is doing everything wrong! Leave that job as soon as you possibly can. Period.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#19Log hours is not required on my day job but I heavily do this easily with org-mode. This just get things done at least for me. I would recommend this if you're using emacs. Org-mode has a feature of time clocking as demonstrated in this link [0] that you could handle everything even if you got interrupted. Org-mode is amazing that you could track everything. Generating a clocking report for review is easy as pressing two keystrokes on your keyboard[1].
If you're new to using emacs, just use it for everything, every day, every time and after 3 months you'll be comfortable with it and might be able to like org-mode.
There are lot of resources over the internet, stackoverflow, mailing list, blogs, etc. If you're keen to learning emacs then the most important thing is just use it, use it, use it, use it.
[0] - http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking
[1] - http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#TimeReportingAndTracking
Re: Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?
#20I had to track hours in recent jobs. I have tried a lot of tools, but found that Hamster's Gnome3 extension was the least distracting, and actually helped to keep me on task.
I will only got better at predicting time, when log/report ing real-hours not expected-hours.
I also set a maximum time spent blocked on tasks, ideally a short period, and reported every time I go beyond that point. This way if I needed help, I could get it. If help is not provided, employers wont be surprised by work schedule.