Cautionary tale: Do not ignore an introduction of time tracking

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Jerrysmithowns@reddit

shit, been there logging every damn call drove me nuts. solid red flag, bail if you can or push back early. We pressured our boss to switch to less big brothery stuff like Timecamp

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fued@reddit

I add at absolute minimum, 30 minutes each day for time tracking.

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I did this one and got a comment that time tracking should be included in the ticket times and I couldn't put it on internal time (we have to be 100% billable which is an absolute joke). Now I just track my meeting and look at which tickets I've done the day and devide roughly by ticket count. Fuck time tracking. I understand it's necessary for an agency, but not when you are 80% scheduled on a project

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fued@reddit

They tried this, I put it as a separate ticket item and they send those to the client, clients were not happy to be billed for timesheets

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OtherwisePush6424@reddit

At one of the places I worked and they introduced strict time tracking, I literally created a Context Switching ticket and logged 15-20 minutes against it multiple times a day. When I accepted another offer they were very helpful and quick with the paperwork.

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Final_UsernameBismil@reddit

I don’t understand what that last sentence means or is otherwise implying.

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anonyuser415@reddit

Back in 2018 I had to log to the minute

Toggl was open source then, so I wrote a connector to our awful enterprise tracker, and the sync would distribute 30 minutes of time tracking and context switching across all the tickets I tracked time on.

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Mornar@reddit

Timetracking in general I can see being someone trying but being very misguided. Tracking time to the minute has to be an absolutely deliberate malice, either against the employees or the company, I can't imagine how someone with a functional brain would think this is a good idea.

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anonyuser415@reddit

It was a managed service provider and in retrospect the owners were trying to maximize billable hours because they were courting an acquisition.

I wound up going from an IC to managing 8 people in half a year, and then was told to inform my team that the acquisition would entail reducing salaries or titles without specifics. I quit, no job lined up. My TC was 3x at the next job.

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ccricers@reddit

That at least sounds less insane than trying to court investors that want to backseat manage the product development so much with things like screenshot taking software etc.

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csanon212@reddit

I worked at a place that told me if I spent time filling out my timesheet, it was the same as being on a break, and I could not bill time for it.

So effectively I lied and just billed that time to some other client rather than stay for an extra 15-30 mins.

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severoon@reddit

Send an email asking for specific direction. "Just following up with a quick question. You mentioned to me that we should mark time spent filling out timesheets with detailed tracking as break time. Is there a specific non billing code we should use, or just mark it as general break time? In the spirit of submitting accurate time tracking records, I'm assuming we should use a different code because it's not a trivial amount of time, so I just wanted to check."

When you get the reply "just use the code for general break time," reply, "okay, I'll mark time spent doing detailed time tracking as break time. Thanks!" Save that email and start tracking that time separately. After a few weeks you can say "I was talking to some others on break while we were filling out time tracking and I heard that there is a new code for that? I don't think that's right but just wanted to check."

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Itoigawa_@reddit

Same. And I accumulated extra hours that way

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alinroc@reddit

if I spent time filling out my timesheet, it was the same as being on a break, and I could not bill time for it.

That can't be legal, can it? You are literally doing work required by the company.

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gHx4@reddit

Depends where, but in a lot of places that is illegal for hourly work. Employers can and do attempt it, however.

It's also important that billable hours doesn't always refer to billing your employer -- if you work at a consultancy, you usually have a base salary you earn that covers your working time and breaks, and then you've got billable hours that are paid by the client to your company, which then pays you extra on top of your salary. So in that context, not billing the client for unrelated operational expenses might be reasonable, but logging it as unbilled breaktime could also constitute fraud.

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ariiizia@reddit

That’s wage theft.

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csanon212@reddit

It was - and I tried getting that policy in writing. They were smart enough to never respond to my emails inquiring - they would only talk about this aspect of filling out timesheets.

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squeasy_2202@reddit

On the employer's side, for sure

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ariiizia@reddit

That’s what wage theft means; an employer stealing time from an employee

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TheSilentCheese@reddit

That's ridiculous. I've always billed breaks to whatever task I was working on when I needed a break. One company that was trying to maximize client billing explicitly told me to.

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sevseg_decoder@reddit

Hahaha I tried that and ended up unemployed because my 3.25 entry looked more like the work of a 2.75…

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putocrata@reddit

Great opportunity for a product that takes screenshot every X seconds and categorize the task with AI, and correlate with keyboard/mouse input signals to see if the person is actually working or just have an ide open while is rising his phone.

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ccricers@reddit

A really perverse example of "It's not about the end result, it's about the journey!"

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hobbycollector@reddit

I have 3 screens right now. I think I would go to 15.

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fued@reddit

completely illegal in nearly every country except America tho

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putocrata@reddit

yeah, land of the free

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PmanAce@reddit

Strange, takes me 5 seconds each time I start something to click a button to start the tracking. I'll do 5-6 different things per day.

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Prudent-Finance9071@reddit

Not allowed to use the track time button, they find its inaccurate. Often the type of tasks that land in my lap aren't even ticketed yet anyways.

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

What do they consider to be more accurate?

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Prudent-Finance9071@reddit

People making up their own numbers. Yup.

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fued@reddit

Depends if you are just a code monkey or a a guy with too many hats

When I'm a code monkey who just works on a single project it's super fast too, when I'm doing presales, discoveries, planning and crap, that time tracking is ridiculous.

Much prefer to be a code monkey when I can 🤣

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ComfortableJacket429@reddit

Maybe the problem isn’t the time tracking in this case

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PmanAce@reddit

Sure, but then you'd be more than an "experienced dev".

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Appropriate-Sea4782@reddit

I make for me app to track time without killing productivity. Just write task, click on the track. All.

After a week or more I can analyse where i spend a lot of time where is not. And can know always how much and what the work cost for me by time

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PM_40@reddit

Not only productivity, also morale.

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

If you are contacting them time tracking is a basic component of your day...

How would you invoice otherwise?

If you invoice a company 40 hours then showing those 40 hours and what you did is a pretty basic part of the job

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

The only scenarios in which time tracking makes sense is for hourly contractor-type workers, or for employees that have to bill a client by the hour.

Required time tracking for salaried employees working on internal projects is nothing but useless busywork and in many cases insane micromanagement. Nobody sensible would use these numbers for anything of importance.

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ccricers@reddit

I interviewed a company that already did the time estimates for you. Their instructions were, bill for the time you took for the task or the time estimate that's already pre-determined on your tickets, whichever is lower. I had to nope out of there.

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

They were only going to pay you some max time amount?

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ccricers@reddit

Yeah, billable items were capped at the pre-determined estimate.

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

That's a great way to lose your ass. You were smart to bail from that disaster.

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

There should be some high level time accounting for internal metrics but it shouldn't go beyond that.

If the salary person is doing work for a project that is billed out then it also needs to be tracked as well to make sure the project doesn't lose money.

If a team member is doing work on something that is billed or charged hourly same there.

Depending on various things of course.

If it takes person A 10 hours to do a task that others do in 5 then something is off there.

There are a ton of good reasons to track time internally.

We are of course talking about a contractor so it's all a bit moot.

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Mirage-Mirage-Mirage@reddit

And that’s why charging by units of time is bullshit. Do you time track your plumber? Your general contractor? Your accountant? Of course not. You request service and they charge for the service.

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platinummyr@reddit

Some stuff is billed by hours tho. Which presumably is time tracked

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epelle9@reddit

Point is it makes no sense to bill by hours.

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VintageModified@reddit

I can't tell if y'all are being willfully ignorant or just missing the point. When you look at a contractor's invoice for a plumbing job, does it say: - investigated source of leak: 35min - disconnected couplers: 5min - retrieved replacement part from truck: 5min - connected new parts: 10min - applied sealant: 10min

Or does it say: - labor: 1.1hrs

Obviously you should track overall project time. The problem is micromanagement of every single task you do.

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

Yes I time track my plumber. You should because they will charge you by time.

Time still must be tracked and ALL of those parties ultimately work on time.

If you don't work on units of time you will end up losing money.

An accountant will not charge $100 for something that will take 10 hours. If try do they will lose money.

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Mirage-Mirage-Mirage@reddit

The point is, time is very poor proxy for value delivered or anything that should determine the price of your service. If my accountant can provide a specialized, urgent service, unavailable anywhere else, should charge according to time or according to the value of their service.

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

Time is a great proxy for value because at the end of the day you have to spend time doing something

It shouldn't be the ONLY way you determine value.

If you are. It accounting for your time when you charge you're going to screw yourself over.

If that accountant charges $100 for the amazing service but takes 10 hours do you think he is charging well for his time?

I am not and have ever said that things should be charged only by time.

I am saying that if you don't value your time properly you WILL lose money.

What if the accountant improves at their job or acquires a new tool that allows them to perform the service 10x faster. Should they charge 10x less?

They should change their fee structure based on their business needs.

If they can charge less and get more customers then yes.

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kisielk@reddit

Uh yeah? Every bill I’ve ever received from a contractor has a materials component and a time component.

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Hey-GetToWork@reddit

I'd say there is a big difference between time tracking against a project as a whole, compared to time tracking basic tasks - "Tasks, daily, refinement, code review, services redeployment, etc".

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DerangedGecko@reddit

Exactly. It's when you start getting down to ultra-precise details for the sake of the ever vague "analytics". So, you want to groom and estimate tickets for others, break that down into sub-tasks, estimate each one of those sub-tasks, manage a bunch of scheduled and unscheduled meetings, do my own coding work, etc... and estimate and record everything down to the minute? Fuck off. I'm spending a third of my day just tracking minute bullshit in-between the context switching.

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QuantityInfinite8820@reddit

It completely kills the vibe and the creative process needed for employees to be productive and bring the most long-term value to the project

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teslas_love_pigeon@reddit

You're looking at it through the wrong lens, it's not about productivity but about controlling employees.

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Reddit_is_fascist69@reddit

If you have to track, toggle makes it really easy.

Previous company, I tracked over 20 hrs of meeting a month for multiple months

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OtherwisePush6424@reddit

Time tracking kills the soul.

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jeremyckahn@reddit

You're gonna have to track how long that soul death took, please and thank you

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OtherwisePush6424@reddit

And can you explain why it took so long please 😃

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ButWhatIfPotato@reddit

But it makes stakeholder pp look soooooo big!

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Hejro@reddit

Dude my last company was time tracking I quit after like 3 months. At the start of the week you’d have to come up with 40 hours of work and in hindsight I realized that they never mentioned that I wasn’t including that part in my time tracking. Like I wasn’t tracking the amount of time it takes to come up with 40 hours worth of estimated tasks. Then after that at the end of the week I’d get grilled for not matching those estimates. I was like dude it’s a bug fix. If I knew how long it’d take I’d have done it then. Such a stupid company.

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

Read my update. :(

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Hejro@reddit

I did. I didn’t like anyone in my company so I don’t mind them going under.

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sonstone@reddit

While I agree that time tracking at a micro level is a waste, I don’t agree with the premise. There must be some level of time tracking or you can’t properly plan as a business. There are lots of ways to do this to an acceptable accuracy though without tracking at a discrete task level. Some companies do this better than others, but it’s not uncommon for executives with little hands on experience in the field to propose more detailed time tracking to solve the problem of determining how much a project cost and how accurate are their estimates so they can use that for planning and prioritization purposes.

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PM_40@reddit

There must be some level of time tracking or you can’t properly plan as a business.

Correct, 100%. I think that kind of tracking will probably be in half day increments not 3 or 5 min increments.

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WeedFinderGeneral@reddit

I've had multiple jobs where they cracked down on time tracking while also having no real substantial work for me for months at a time. So I'd just be logging 8hrs to the generic in-house task every day while asking for real work, but they'd still get on my ass for not filling out hours as if it it actually did anything useful.

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PM_40@reddit

but they'd still get on my ass for not filling out hours as if it it actually did anything useful.

This is called backwards management, management from activity and logs and not task quality.

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LuckyWriter1292@reddit

When I was in consulting it made sense as we had different projects/clients…

I then worked for a company who wanted to introduce it for all non management positions - it was a manufacturer and there was no project work.

The staff revolted and productivity dropped and they lost some great workers.

I don’t care if my manager wants me to time track - if they aren’t technical and they start asking why a task took so long, that’s when i will push back.

My manager at the manufacturer had a finance background - she alienated the whole dev team and we all quit.

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FedUp233@reddit

I like that they want it for all “non management positions”. If you are going to track time for engineers, programmers, office managers, etc, why would you not start with the managers who are probably being paid more per hour than any of the others? If managers can’t justify their time, why should anyone else!

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Sallas_Ike@reddit

I work for a large company as a salaried employee. I am not a contractor. We are not a consultancy and we don't make software for external clients; we make and maintain our own products. My team works on one and only one project. So this isn't about budget monitoring.

Nevertheless I am required to log 42.5 hours of time every week. Specifically 8.5 hours per day.

I have gotten shit for logging only 8 hours and 15 minutes on a day (there is no ticket for the time spent logging time lol).

I have gotten shit for logging 9 hours on a day (I was not expecting/claiming overtime payments or anything).

I have gotten shit for logging my hours accurately when I was ASKED to stay late to fix an issue in prod.

I have gotten shit for logging time to parent tickets instead of the child tickets. I have gotten shit for logging too much time on one specific subtask, and not enough time on another.

I have gotten shit for not completing my time sheets on the very day the work is done, and instead doing them the following day retrospectively (even though the system only syncs once per week).

I have gotten shit for PROACTIVELY logging time in advance of it being done, e.g. when we have a scheduled all-afternoon workshop.

For good measure every once in a while I get shit for not reading minds when an ad hoc query comes in from management and I log my time answering to the wrong ticket.

I love everything else about my job but I am seriously considering other offers because of how infuriatingly fascistic the time tracking practices are at this place.

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voqara@reddit

Time tracking and invoicing platform here. This is about the worst imaginable way to implement time tracking. Requiring an exact number of hours to be logged per day just for its own sake is essentially implementing Goohart's Law from the get-go; it tells the higher ups nothing. It's micromanagment in one of its purest forms with no goal other than to keep tabs on people. Time tracking can be useful, but not like this.

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voqara@reddit

Time tracking and invoicing platform here. This is about the worst imaginable way to implement time tracking. Requiring an exact number of hours to be logged per day just for its own sake tells the higher ups nothing. It's micromanagment in one of its purest forms with no goal other than to keep tabs on people. Time tracking can be useful, but not like this.

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OkMortgage8976@reddit

Is this ADP? Lol

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fuckoholic@reddit

I have gotten shit for all of the above except the proactively one. You should just ignore them. They can't really do more to you than to fire you and if they do, you just find something better. Don't take them seriously to avoid burnout, for you are in control and you can drive them crazy by logging something wrong :) One kinda gets used to it. Your boss will be angry for 5 minutes and then it will pass, and you will remain.

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c3hearts@reddit

it’s accounting usually that’s the problem

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Classic-Pay7308@reddit

I was going to say I am surprised you haven't got sh*t from your conscience for probably screaming in your head "This is a pile of sh*t!" Honestly, if I went through all the effort and have shown the great patience you have had for your company, the voice in my head wouldn't give me any peace.

I wouldn't be surprised if in time, your love for your job slowly dwindled if this continued.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

There comes a point where harassing people about totally unimportant things is just a ploy to reduce payroll. It’s negging.

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paholg@reddit

Jesus, that sounds maddening. I don't think I could last a week.

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The-Wizard-of-AWS@reddit

I’d be out on day one.

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saddadmusic@reddit

Ngl it sounds like we may have worked at the same place.

Do they perchance use Jira and have a horrible, warehouse size open plan office for the I.T department?

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SoCalChrisW@reddit

You just described almost every corporate job I've ever had.

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dontuseliqui@reddit

Switzerland? Because this sounds exactly like it 🤣

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guack-a-mole@reddit

Have you started writing your own time tracker because the company has "unique needs"? We did

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

Just tell them what they want to hear. Every day is precisely 8.5 hrs, no matter what actually happens. Obviously minimize any extra time per day, as they deserve no favors.

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jegsar@reddit

In the us CAPEX vs OPEX time has big impact to taxes and overall profits... it is required unless you want the company to pay more taxes then it needs to... and while I think we all agree billionaires should pay more, most startups can't or it would just make it harder.

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wildcardabab@reddit

This is the answer. I'll be the first to say I hate timesheets, but they aren't (usually) a tool to monitor employees. They are very important for auditing and taxes. I've been on both sides of this equation, having to roll them out and fill them out. It sucks and the best thing to do as an employer to be transparent about the reasoning and make it as painless as possible.

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Affectionate-Bike-10@reddit

A friend of a friend developed an AI agent that compared Jira logs to the electronic dot log and Git evolution. Even though he was an employee, today he agreed that it is necessary. It even brought real data that helped increase salaries. It's a necessary evil

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aqjo@reddit

If you must….
https://timeflip.io

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

During all these years, I built my own time tracker.

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Then-Boat8912@reddit

In the past I’ve seen people ask where they should log their time for tracking and logging their time — it was so bad.

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ninjabunnies6@reddit

Left my job last year within 2 months of time tracking being introduced. Best decision I ever made, got an ever better one after I left without any micromanagement.

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binarycow@reddit

The only time that detailed time tracking is acceptable is when it's used to bill clients.

As in, "I spent 3 hours working on this bug, so 3 hours should be billed to client X". And all time related to that client should be included in that amount - time on Jira, time conversing with coworkers about it, etc.

Basically, how lawyers do it.

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forbiddenknowledg3@reddit

So glad I don't have to do that shit anymore. They always picked the worst possible software to do it as well.

We're no longer profitable, and the time tracking all of a sudden started to make sense.

Am I missing but what does that have to do with time tracking?

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Skithiryx@reddit

Not profitable -> Look to cut expenses -> Upper Management is desperate to know where their labour costs are going (theoretically to then choose what to cut) -> time tracking starts

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jcradio@reddit

While time tracking can be used to micromanage, I suspect it may have more to do with accounting practices. Some work, like R&D, is capitalized while KTLO is expensed. With recent changes in taxes, being able to take R&D as an expense may help with that.

Beyond those reasons, keeping track of time is archaic for engineering. I want the team to focus on being "engaged" as much as possible. Most business managers apply techniques that work for assembly line tracking, but don't matter in software. The whole "you can't manage what you don't measure ".

There are better ways to measure, but most management teams won't adopt what they don't understand.

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kayakdawg@reddit

manage outputs, not inputs

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jonfrans@reddit

That's not how accounting works unfortunately.

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jonfrans@reddit

This is an underrated answer. Being able to expense certain categories of work makes it potentially very valuable to have time tracking implemented, annoying as it may be.

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NegativeSemicolon@reddit

It’s usually an accounting trick to capitalize developer hours and avoid taxes.

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adambkaplan@reddit

I was a consultant on a “time and materials” contract. Client decided that they shouldn’t pay as much for us to fix bugs, which led to us time tracking by JIRA ticket. It was a nightmare.

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zZurf@reddit

Damn am I the only one here that has time tracking easy? Ours are just generic fields which no one ever checks. I just put anything tbh.

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skeletal88@reddit

I work for a consultancy, here we track time to invoice our customers. It depends on the project, the best ones are these that are already using contractors for other projects, with them we just register 8 or 4 hours each day depending if it was a shortened work day because of public holidays or not.

Some others are more interested in what the billable time is spent on and time tracking is more granular, but we mostly register it to some story. Unless its a day of meetings with the customer or something.

But.. what does your startup want to achieve with this very exact tracking?

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

But.. what does your startup want to achieve with this very exact tracking?

Now, this is the best part! The official reason is that they want to know how many hours were spent on each project (please keep in mind that hours spent on customer support are minuscule). This is a very vague explanation; it pretty much tells you nothing, and it can be interpreted in many ways. For example, we're spending too many hours on a project that is not even that important. I guess we shut it down... Or, god forbid, to check how many hours each developer had spent on a task so we can "optimize" that. :) In the end, I've never witnessed time tracking being forced so aggressively and granularly.

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NoCoolNameMatt@reddit

Oh, man.

I once got audited because my team (I'm a team lead) was "way over budget" on a high priority project, and our VP went ballistic. We were already doing time tracking, so she brought in all of my team members over a period of weeks and forced us to justify every entry.

The reason for being over budget is that she forgot to enter any time at all in the budget for my team.

I destroyed her. "We're all salary. How many real dollars did you waste trying to find imaginary dollars that you forgot to allocate?" I was PISSED.

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skeletal88@reddit

Lol, wtf, really 😃 how did you find out? If it took weeks

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NoCoolNameMatt@reddit

Oh, she tried to make me fall on that sword in a big meeting. It wasn't pretty - she looked like a fool in front of her peers, I had to defend myself pretty vehemently, and all-in-all I'd have rather avoided the entire set of circumstances - but given that we were already there I had to defend myself and my team.

That was a year ago, and we're both on good footing again professionally, but she won't look me in the eye and I can no longer trust her.

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MoveInteresting4334@reddit

Not at all arguing with you on how silly or unproductive this is, but I can give a different perspective.

Before I was a dev, I worked on the Operations side of tech startups. Did a lot of bookkeeping. We often tried to get a handle on:

How much a project is costing vs how much it brings in. This requires knowing how much of our dev payroll is going to each project.
How much a specific project cost to develop vs cost to maintain, as tax outcomes were different for development costs vs maintenance costs this requires knowing how much dev time was spent on support vs new development.

Chasing these numbers was always somewhat futile, but nonetheless necessary from a business perspective.

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gefahr@reddit

100%, and in my role now if I could wave a magic wand and get some set of data about our department.. it would be exactly that (well, an accurate version of that).

It's extremely difficult to get a handle on this. I'm ambivalent to time tracking, have never tried forcing it on people. Don't want to, but if I thought it would work to get accurate data I would do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I think it provides bad data most of the time.

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skeletal88@reddit

The thing with time tracking is - do the bosses expect everyones daily time to add up to 8h or not?

Because i don't believe anyone is actually working 8h days on specific tasks. You go and get a coffe, you chat with colleagues, you read e-mail and read messages, etc, things which arent connected to any particular project sometimes.

Maybe actual code writing is 4-5h? So what do the higher ups expect to see? Upon this depends on what people will report and what data you will get, how useful it is. If they want to see everyones working hours covered by time tracking then people will pad their hours so they will cover the whole day so they don't look bad

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MoveInteresting4334@reddit

A good manager with a strong tech background should already know you can’t be heads down coding 100% of the time.

A good manager without a strong tech background should look across the board and see no dev is heads down coding 100% of the time and be able to extrapolate from there.

When I was managing these things, I was looking for actionable data, not a stick to start whacking the devs with. You won’t get anywhere forcing work habits and time management on people. As a good manager, your real levers are adjusting team culture, leading by example, and recognition/reward.

Unfortunately, many managers are not good managers.

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

Many bad managers expect all workers to give the proverbial 110%. Nobody can ever do this all the time of course. But plenty of bad managers and bad companies insist on employees lying to them and pretending that 110% is possible at all times. Many employees go along with this and tell the passable lie for the sake of career advancement or stability. Management will eventually start to believe their own bullshit.

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MoveInteresting4334@reddit

I think this is why you sometimes see a business split new feature work and maintenance work into two teams. It makes fudging these numbers easier.

Of course, then the people maintaining the code aren’t the same people writing it, which causes far worse problems.

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trembling_leaf_267@reddit

I was at a place that implemented something like this, with similar reasoning. It was guaranteed to us that it would never, ever be used for predictive tracking for new projects, or for micromanagement, because that would be silly.

So, within two weeks of full implementation it was being used for predictive and micromanagement.

The problem was that the business people couldn't help themselves. They were so desperate to try and control the uncontrollable that they immediately started trying to use it as a crowbar.

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MoveInteresting4334@reddit

No arguments here. You’ll never stop an MBA with an ego big enough to assume he’s the first person to consider the word “optimize”.

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Solonotix@reddit

My current company has time buckets for meetings. One for design meetings, one for non-technical meetings (think all-hands and such). Thankfully, I'm also on a team that doesn't get too heavily scrutinized for our time. We specialize in providing internal support and services for other teams, so we are essentially a fixed cost. We report our who costs us time, and they have to shoulder the cost. That's not to say we get a blank check, but more that I get to have a much more laid-back approach to time-keeping.

Doesn't mean it's any less annoying, but at least I get to report in blocks of 2-4 hours, rather than micro-budgeting my time between every action

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Milrich@reddit

Honestly, this is better for the engineer. Lost 2 hours in a meeting? It now shows. 3 hours talking with someone from another team? No problem.

Next time your micromanager asks why this task took so long, show him how your day was wasted with these other tasks.

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SoInsightful@reddit

Lost 2 hours in a meeting? It now shows.

Has this ever changed anything for anyone?

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Dukaso@reddit

Yup.

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praetor-@reddit

Yeah but what about an hour lost to reddit or researching a movie you saw 5 minutes of in 1997

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Potato-Engineer@reddit

Those are important minutes! All 65 of them!

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sevseg_decoder@reddit

Fuck no. Meetings included it’s totally unreasonable to expect 8 full hours of work from someone, every day, regardless of how many different tickets they switched between or how much work they had available.

It’s fine if they tell you you can record 2 hours as unrecovered on the average day, “humans stretch their legs, chat with coworkers and handle non-billable work.”

But when they’re expecting every 30 (or even 15 in many cases) minutes across your whole day, ready to make you defend your time entries if anything looks padded to them, this kind of shit makes even the most pleasant job just horrible.

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

this kind of shit makes even the most pleasant job just horrible.

Combine that with forced 5-days a week RTO, strict badge tracking, dismal office environment, and daily 8 AM meetings, that will force a whole lot of people out of the company. Or at least they'll be sorely miserable until they can leave. This is what many companies seem to be striving for in today's market, if they aren't laying people off outright.

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CrazyEmployer6547@reddit

This is true. We have made some improvements here. Currently, our department only holds meetings on Mondays. The rest of the time, if necessary, they will use one-on-one conversations to solve problems, which is more effective rather than large meetings with multiple people.

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PsychologicalCell928@reddit

and if you're a programmer cite the research that shows that interruptions cause more lost time because it takes longer to get back into the zone. If I recall correctly, for complicated programs it took the programmer 10-15 minutes to "get in the zone" and reach maximum productivity. Being interrupted for more than 1 minute brought them out of the zone and resumption took another 10 minutes to regain focus.

Just Google "affect of interruptions on programmers".

Way back when, we printed some articles like this and distributed them desk to desk including managers. We also added signs on office doors indicating whether interruptions were permissable. Most people organized their morning and afternoon breaks to coincide. That gave some level of socialization without constant interruptions. At one place that used shared calendars people could see scheduled breaks and plan accordingly.

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3n91n33r@reddit

No one will really care about the sentiment on how research shows interruptions are harmful. This assumption requires reasonable people to begin with.

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PsychologicalCell928@reddit

lol ! I understand.

Sometimes drastic measures are required. Strategies we’ve used in the past:

Working on a different floor. This works if you have hot desking in the same building.
Working in the contingency site. “Volunteering” to help out the IT guys.
Phone system. We had glass windows separating the cubicles. When one of the know “interrupters” would be seen entering a cubicle -thirty seconds later the cubical owners deskphone would ring. “Sorry, I have to take this!” Followed by “boss wants to see me”
Back when beepers were common the annoying person would get beeped using a dial out line from the central number.

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MoveInteresting4334@reddit

Individual offices? With doors? In this economy?

Management

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cjthomp@reddit

"We believe that the open floor plan increases the sense of community and fosters collaboration. Your request for an office is denied. Please close the door on your way out."

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MoveInteresting4334@reddit

That last sentence 🤌🏻

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voodooprawn@reddit

15 y/e here, started as a junior, have lead teams and now a CTO (at a small company).

My two cents is that time tracking can be done very badly. If you're asking people to track when they go to the toilet or make a coffee... Or if you're asking someone why there is 15 minutes missing from last Tuesday. These are all red flags to me.

But I think you if introduced pragmatically, it can definitely help evaluating the accuracy of estimates, spot when people are being involved in too many meetings, check progress of new starters, work out how many hours were done for a specific client/project etc.

I've worked at several companies that have tracked time but never in a way that felt like I was being micromanaged or judged. At the current place, we don't track time, but we've talked about it..

Basically, I think there are ways of doing it that can be positive for the company and not a total nightmare for the team. Not too granular and not too strict.. also worth remembering that if you don't implement it correctly, people will just fudge the numbers any way...

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localhost8100@reddit

My last contract position, my manager would call people and ask them "why were you in meeting with this person on this day". We had to justify that meeting. Now I wasted 30 mins for this meeting damn. The anxiety if my timesheets is gonna be approved or not, kills my productivity.

Manager changed after few months and new manager was chill. I just logged hours on tickets and he would not bother me.

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theeburneruc@reddit

just make sure to track how the anxiety caused by needing to track causes delays /s

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Particular_Camel_631@reddit

Sometimes you need time tracking.

For example, you can capitalise software development time spent creating new features, but not in tube fixing old bugs.

Also, you can claim tax credits on r&d but not on maintenance.

Getting those finances right means you need to know (and he able to evidence to the auditors) the percentage of time spent on those activities.

That’s nothing to do with micromanagement. It is, I agree, a pain to do.

Tye key is to get the proportions about right, not to log everything.

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UntestedMethod@reddit

One personal benefit I've found in tracking my time is that it's helped curb my workaholic tendency to work extra hours if I haven't quite finished my task at hand.

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JohnDillermand2@reddit

If your company does contracting it client billing, it's hard to get away from time tracking. I personally don't mind most time tracking, but I have a little trick to weed out micromanaging. Every week I will put a single 15 minute entry for "cleaning my desk", if I ever get backlash for that, I am nopeing my way out the door.

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UntestedMethod@reddit

Our company brought in time tracking with the reason of improving estimates and specifically said it wouldn't be for measuring performance.

It would be totally whack if they decided to start trying to compare developer performance based on self-reported time because I know for a fact we're all doing it differently. Some are precise about it, others are logging an entire day to a single task before the day even begins.

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donatj@reddit

At my old job we did client work, so tracking my hours made more sense. I was never very good at it.

At my current job, we just maintain a couple products and once in a while we get a greenfield. We're supposed to track our own time and submit it at the end of the month so they can play some sort of tax games with the numbers.

We're given no tools or resources to help us. The work I do and way my brain is wired, I context switch 30-40 times an hour, so getting a real accurate measure of that is very difficult if not impossible.

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soft_white_yosemite@reddit

Tangent - I’ve always time-tracked myself whether the company wants it or not. I want it as documentation in case they claim I’ve not been working.

It’s also handy as a log of details about what I was doing. I can go back and see why I made certain decisions.

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Working_Noise_1782@reddit

If time tracking is bad? How does your EM calculate or allocate budget?

Maybe, there was a bunch of slackers and they this was the shot across the bow. Especially if money is running out. Not saying down to the minute is necessary, but managers need to be able to allocate budget for individual tasks.

This happens in alot of industries, notvjust engineering.

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AnomalousBrain@reddit

Time tracking helps if you get audited because it's easier to prove and justify the costs and expenses if everything.

It's really only an issue if you get people breathing down your neck about stuff all the time, because yeah sometimes a feature just takes way longer than expected or it should have been simple and it REALLY isn't.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

Time tracking can be worse if audited. I worked at a place with defense contracts and they made us all use the same time tracking process. You were not allowed to write your time down on paper and then enter it later because if the auditors found the paper and they didn’t match, god help us all. Even if you worked late on a Friday helping someone and wanted to take comp time the next Monday to make up for it (we weren’t allowed to exceed 40 hours a week, and how am I supposed to guess that Steve will have a crisis Friday afternoon when you only had three hours left on this pay period?

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already_in@reddit

I worked for a company that was slowly increasing the time tracking details. I changed the company, but my colleagues yelled that it got worse.

If you plan 540 minutes on a task (yeah, minutes!) and them spent 600 minutes, you must write why it happened. The time tracking started to get so much time that they started to track the time tracking activity. On average, they spend 2 days per month on time tracking activity. Oh, the time spent in daily meetings must match with the other peers, so combine this information previously.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

They didn't receive the salary bonus that year because "the productivity decreased" .

So system working as intended. These things are all about disrespect and why should I pay a person a bonus if they cannot even follow “simple instructions” that are some make work task I made up.

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

If you're a contractor how do you expect to bill responsibly without some sort of time tracking?

You're not an employee so you must be tracking time unless you want to work for free beyond your contract terms.

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

You kind of missed the point. For me, it's totally fine.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

Did you get used to tracking your time in three different systems at the same time?

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

I guess I did... If you should be time tracking anyway then why is it a sign of micromanagement?

Why is introducing it an issue? Shouldn't it already be done as a contractor?

Or are you a contractor who shouldn't be a contractor?

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

I am a contractor, and as I already mentioned, I got used to time tracking. What I try to point out is how a sudden and non-transparent change can be a symptom of something much bigger.

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kibblewhite@reddit

This reminds me of this video about what your time is worth.

https://youtu.be/jE53O1PzmNU

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picklestheyellowcat@reddit

I understand his point but time matters and is important especially when it comes to managing scope, accountability and deliverables.

That video is more about managing expectations than an argument against tracking and time.

Tasks will take time and projects also will take the time they take and you need to make sure you're being paid for that time properly.

If you bill $100 for a logo and it takes you 1 hour great.

If you bill $100 and it takes you 5 hours then you have just massively fucked yourself up and you're not getting that pay back.

Per project billing still requires break downs of work and timelines for all parties.

If project requires x,y and z and you bill A for all of that great.

You still need to provided timelines because other projects matter and nobody with half a brain is taking a contractor at their word.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

It’s actually in the designer’s best interest to spend a certain amount of time asking the customer questions until they’ve reached choice exhaustion. This is a trick at least some general contractors know. That catalog of wall tile distracts you from things you cannot control, like the physics of falling water. Once you’re worn out on tiling and flooring choices you can’t argue about how you really wanted the sink in the kitchen island. Well too bad because the sewer line can’t reach the island from where it was due to the rise over run code limits, and you’d have to lower the downstairs ceiling to fix that.

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Fair_Permit_808@reddit

I don't get the fear of time tracking either. Using your example, I can learn from that 5h mistake and next time bill them 6h. Without it I would probably forget and just do the same thing again.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

We know that some lyricists have notebooks full of cool turns of phrase they’ve thought up that is just waiting for a song idea to tie them together. But we reward lyricists for finished work and not how long they took to do it. So Dolly Parton is amazing for writing I Will Always Love You and Jolene on the same day, but that fact didn’t make her any more or less money. It explains why she is rich but didn’t make her rich.

But if a designer has a palette of design elements they drain for a fast turnaround on a piece of work where the customer wants something that isn’t derivative, they have to fudge the hours to account for all of that unpaid work they did ahead of time and won’t be able to use for a long time after. Turning creatives and skilled labor into crooked accountants may be one of the more self destructive things we do.

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nfigo@reddit

I got yelled at because 80% of my time was being spent in "other." When my manager asked why, I said "look at the subcategory. That's meetings!"

We then got meeting free days and I was allowed to leave meetings when I wanted to leave them.

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bwainfweeze@reddit

It can help a lot if the meeting has an MC who’s figures out how many people are there for what topics and makes sure the common ones aren’t pushed to the end of the meeting after everyone is tired of being there. If only two or three people need to talk about something they don’t need a fucking meeting for that so they can grandstand at a cost of 1 hour of cumulative time per six minutes of conversation. They can go to each other’s desks or out for coffee. Also why did you wait for the meeting instead of just telling us all what was decided?

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TheSilentCheese@reddit

That's literally the only good outcome of time tracking that I can think of.

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Abject-Kitchen3198@reddit

Few decades in, and I still don't understand it.

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ItsReewindTime@reddit

Worked at one of the top investment bank in the past. They plan layoffs based on which projects you are allocated on the timesheet. If you are working on projects that are on the chopping board, you are getting the chop chop

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fromCentauri@reddit

We time track, but we’re an agency where developers may work on 1-3 projects a day for clients paying hourly and fix bid in some cases. Let’s the PM know what’s been exhausted per client and to seek more payment; it also alerts them when a developer is getting pulled into un-billable work far too often. I think it has helped our org to allow devs to focus more since they can zoom out/in on wasteful trends. Logging time at the end of the day only takes like 5 minutes so I don’t mind it.

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PmanAce@reddit

We track time for R&D related purposes like audits and stuff.

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Kapps@reddit

Time or percentage of time? I feel like tracking hours feels much worse than tracking percentage of time.

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Potato-Engineer@reddit

I'm honestly not sure how you could track percentage of time without tracking hours. You'd just be guessing your percentages.

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Kapps@reddit

Generally we did a daily percentage estimate of what percent of time spent working was on features vs bugs vs whatever. At a daily level, the estimates should be pretty accurate. Not being hour based means you get to avoid annoyances with going for an appointment or things like that.

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gefahr@reddit

Yep, we have to track OpEx/Co(G)S and orthogonally, R&D endeavors, in some level of detail for accounting purposes. They have different tax implications (as well as GAAP implications for reporting purposes, though I don't have a good grasp of these so can't explain better).

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08148694@reddit

Do you track the time spent time tracking? What about the time spent tracking time tracking?

Before you know it all you do is track time and get nothing productive done

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Fair_Permit_808@reddit

Do you track the time spent time tracking? What about the time spent tracking time tracking time tracking?

We do, it's in 15min increments so when I finish work at 16:05 I just write 16:15.

Or If I start at 8:00 I read emails and open stuff for 20min then work for 40min and write 1h. It's not that complicated.

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

No, we do not.

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Beginning_Basis9799@reddit

Time tracking depends on the company.

Brutal honestly or great works of fiction to balance the books

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AnimaLepton@reddit

I used to work at a company that required it, it was a significant annoyance. They were super profitable and did it just because upper management loved to micromanage. Depending on the level of granularity they want, or if they want you to assign time spent to specific customers/projects, that worked out to ~2-2.5 hours per month of time logging.

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CrazyEmployer6547@reddit

And I always like to plan what I'm going to do the next day before going to bed. Some people might argue that plans can't keep up with changes. I understand, but it's like having a travel guide; we don't always follow it, right? Time tracking should be more about ourselves, not just linking to something someone else mentioned.

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CrazyEmployer6547@reddit

Time tracking can actually improve motivation to a certain extent, perhaps by around 20%. However, statistics show that it can lead to far greater negative emotions. Personally, I think this approach to managing employees is unwise. If an employee is not motivated or consistently fails to achieve their goals, then they may not be a good fit and finding a new job might be a better option. A motivated employee can certainly use a "free-range" management approach, provided they can maintain a high rate of task completion. I currently work around 20 to 30 hours per week, and much of the time I'm out and about, visiting different clients. It's very enjoyable, and it also gives me more opportunities to meet new clients.

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deefstes@reddit

In general, we can all agree it's a sign of micromanagement

No we can't. You may not have positive experiences with it but to equate time tracking to micromanagement is short-sighted.

I work as a consultant and so it is imperative that I log my time for invoicing purposes. But even if it weren't for that, I'd still log my time as being able to see how much time I spent on discovery, analysis, development, production monitoring, support etc. and break it down by project is very valuable to our consultants team and to me.

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heubergen1@reddit

Companies also need to introduce time tracking simply for regulatory reasons (at least the work hours) and if you already spend thousands of $ for the system you might as well use it.

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CyberneticLiadan@reddit

Without disagreeing, I want to add that all experienced devs should engage in some private fastidious time tracking for their own benefit. Do it as a self-study and be careful about sharing the results. A few years ago I read Cal Newport's Deep Work and set about seeing how many blocks of focused uninterrupted work I could squeeze into a day.

It showed me that a sustainable pace of work really only included 4 such hours of deep work. I could squeeze out some further productivity through collaborative work like pair programming and design sessions. These days I think I could manage up to 6 hours if I was given the autonomy and trust to zealously protect my calendar. This can also be expanded for brief (\~2 week max) periods of crunch, but really not longer without waking up angry every day.

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Halvinz@reddit

Company is no longer profitable and time tracking will reveal the root cause... how? Moronic CEO and their reasoning.

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gefahr@reddit

Their reasoning seems fine. What's probably incorrect is that they believe the data will be accurate, and it won't be. It'll create weird incentives on how things are reported etc.

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CrazyEmployer6547@reddit

The company's profitability speaks for itself; seemingly perfect data is just a disguise.

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day_tripper@reddit

I tried to accommodate time tracking at multiple different employers.

I have decided I would rather eat my retirement funds or change careers entirely. The stress of the implication that you need to “justify” your time is just shitty. Professionals either put out quality work or they don’t. Of course there is nuance when evaluating output and quality of work. It isn’t all black/white. But I digress.

Twenty years as a SWE taught me that time tracking is the death knell of a dev team. It may not happen immediately but will eventually erode the talent.

The best devs will do it for a while and move to another employer to avoid it, leaving teams with less wise, more naive team members who don’t know any better.

No one who doesn’t have to will suffer micromanagement. Leave such environments as soon as you can.

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FlipperBumperKickout@reddit

If you have to have it at least let the resolution be half days instead of minutes. Then it isn't more than slightly inconvenient.

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Sirk0w@reddit

Been at an HR software company for close to 5 years now. Time tracking is one of the main modules marketed towards and used by our clients (I built it).

Funny thing is, contractors or not, we never track anyone’s time here.

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topological_rabbit@reddit

There are two indicators there is major trouble on the horizon. The first, as you mentioned, is invasive time tracking.

The other? If the toilet paper in the restroom is suddenly replaced with really, really cheap toilet paper, bad news is going to hit a few months down the road.

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rom_romeo@reddit (OP)

I just spilled my coffee. Thank you for that. ;)

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UlyssiesPhilemon@reddit

Oh yeah, also beware if the office coffee quality suddenly goes to shit.

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topological_rabbit@reddit

It's funny, but it's true. I lived through that exact scenario twice. Sudden shitty toilet paper == incoming troubles.

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pl487@reddit

CEO meeting:

"What the hell do you people even do all day?" = Time tracking

"How the hell are we losing money with all this revenue?" = Toilet paper/coffee cuts

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snorktacular@reddit

Downside of working remote is you won't see this coming.

Upside is that I get to use my preferred toilet paper in the privacy of my own bathroom. Also, everything else.

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przemo_li@reddit

I remember how I was slightly nudging junior PM in "cousin" team (same manager but different domain thus different PM) away from task time tracking, and into modeling projections.

I would add that lack of technical leadership is also a probable cause. Two leavers can be pulled, "effect" and "time" and without technical leadership there is no "effect" leaver to pull... So start delivering process & tooling improvement, earn trust, stop filling in task time sheets.

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donjulioanejo@reddit

Counterpoint: if you're working at a small startup, many countries have R&D credits where you can get some of your dev salary reimbursed (usually via tax breaks). But you need to track how much time they spend on R&D.

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0Iceman228@reddit

I really dislike the lack of nuance in many posts or comments about this. I'm off the general opinion that tracking for every minute of your time spent is ridiculous. Had to do it for 14 years, never want to do it again. If I get a bill from our external people, they must of course track by the hour, because you have to pay them for time worked. Generally speaking, you have to do some sort of controlling. It's not like it doesn't matter how long a feature takes. Did we need 2, 4 or 8 weeks of active development time. Making a dev write into the ticket when they done how long it took really doesn't cost them anything. It's simply to get an overview. So many devs act ridiculously entitled on that topic and I don't understand why. And no bad management trying to abuse time tracking is not an argument against it.

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kagato87@reddit

We have time tracking. But it's from above, and performative. We fill out our time sheets so payroll know we actually worked. 2-3 items, all block time. No particular details

I can put "worked on project" or "worked on subtasks" or even "prepped new servers." My manager only cares when I'm directly supporting a specific client, as that can affect our SaaS rates for the client.

There are industries where time tracking matters. For most, it doesn't.

Personally, I leverage my time sheets to know when I'm working too much, so I know when to reduce my work. And to convince my manager to let me just disappear for half a day without taking pto.

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BertRenolds@reddit

I have been with a company that tracks time. Just do what's reasonable and it works out. If you're working on a ticket, track that time as a ticket. It's honestly fine.

I work in bigger tech now, I either work 60 or 25 hour weeks. I miss time tracking as it forced 8 hours a day of work.

I could get away with 40 hour weeks now, but I liked the forced schedule.

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sevseg_decoder@reddit

This doesn’t reflect either of the two jobs I’ve had in consulting.

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DrShocker@reddit

yeah this is my experience as well. I worked somewhere that time tracking was required because of the contracts involved and it meant the weekly hours were normalized.

after that I worked somewhere without tracking and it became clear people put in extra time consistently which IMO is bad because it means that they can't accurately plan out a 40 hour week anymore. (and tbh I don't mind doing more then 40 hours, it's just that the excess time should be for me to work towards my own goals and not the company's)

I can agree with OP that if it turns into micro management that would suck, but that's just not been my experience with time tracking.

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Western_Objective209@reddit

I have to do time tracking because my dept works on some government contracts and it's just... not that bad. I look at my schedule in the morning, guess what I'm going to work on for a couple minutes, then at around 5pm I just pop in some numbers and hit save.

Also, like you said, it keeps you from working more than 8 hours in a day. It did take a little while to get used to and I hated it at first, but I spend like 5 min on it max

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trembling_leaf_267@reddit

Once, a skunk-works project where I worked, that was definitely not tracked, brought in $billions.

Detailed time tracking (and rigorous Agile, for that matter) tends to kill stuff like that.

I've never been sure if that's good or bad, since some engineers were just wasting time, while others were pursuing things that were the future of the company.

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Deto@reddit

It makes sense in some cases. For example, we have a matrixed environment where different people work on different/multiple projects and programs. At the end of the month they ask people to estimate what % of their time was on each program because they're trying to track how much each of these initiatives is costing the company.

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Ch3t@reddit

We have timesheets. I don't have a problem with that. I log my time every evening before logging off. We have had poor management for a long time. The latest manager of our team demanding we also track time in a spreadsheet. We have to account for every minute of the day. It must add up and match the timesheet software. The manager likes to go in and change the hours to what he thinks you did. I keep 3 other records on my own so I can reconstruct the spreadsheet when he screws around with it. We also have to fill out a weekly PowerPoint slide with highlights and the time we spent. We also track time in the ticketing system. I start updating the spreadsheet and timesheet every day at 4PM. I logoff when it's done. I rarely logoff before 5. We had one guy send an email to the entire department saying he couldn't work with the manager and listed the tracking as the main reason. I requested a lateral transfer in a skip level meeting. The skip asked if it because of the tracker. I said no, it was because the manager was a micromanaging asshole. I was told I could not be moved, so I said I would be leaving as soon as I find another job. Still looking for that next job. I have pulled out of two prospects because they both appeared to have management issues.

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SanityAsymptote@reddit

I worked for a martech startup that used time instead of points for stories.

It got nightmarish really fast when they only allowed tech leads to do time estimates on tasks (because they were lower) and held everyone to them.

They would not give even senior devs enough hours to fill the day and then demand they go onto a special slack channel that notified your supervisor and beg for more work from other teams.

The new teams would often give you a 15 minute task to fill your missing 3 hours for the day. It would take 2 hours to get their project building and then they'd get furiously angry with you because "that's all the time we can spare for that client".

At the end of the day I feel like the excessive time tracking was just offloading work from the client management teams onto the devs so they never had bad metrics.

That job was so fucking stressful. I am also profoundly skeptical of any company that says they "have time tracking" figured out now based on how self congratulatory that one was about it.

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false79@reddit

Time tracking is less of a chore if you have a plan for the day at the start of the day. So before I start coding, I would have already logged it in the time tracking software.

Is it possible that what I actually did compared to what I logged is different? I could give zero f's . Nobody is going to actually check it. Management just checks at best the time tracking exists.

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