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My fellow employees and I are supposed to send a "time sheet" detailing how many hours we work, how much time we spent working on "x" and "y", etc., via e-mail

My fellow employees and I are supposed to send a "time sheet" detailing how many hours we work, how much time we spent working on "x" and "y", etc., via e-mail every week (by noon on Monday for the previous week). I have a cron job that fires off a Perl script at 8:45 a.m. every Monday morning that composes that e-mail and sends it off for me. On the rare occasion that I was on vacation the previous week (and forgot to disable it), I just text our payroll lady and tell her to "ignore that e-mail, I was on vacation last week". She knows it's automated and she doesn't care. She's required to receive an e-mail from me before she pays me and that satisfies her requirements. The boss knows too, he just shook his head and laughed when I told him about it. It sorta reminds me of how, when a "measure productivity by number of tickets closed" policy gets enacted, everyone just starts creating tickets for every menial thing they do. My second favorite is the one that runs once an hour, deleting any IP addressing / DHCP lease / similar data older than 24 hours (I work for an ISP). Sorry, IP-Echelon, the company policy (which I wrote and enacted) says we don't keep that (IP <-> User) data for more than a day, so I can't "ensure the user and/or IP address owner refrains from future use and sharing" because I don't know and can't tell who it was.

mattmanser 10y ago
Yeah, incentivizing by tickets is always dangerous, coincidentally there was a story in the UK papers yesterday about employees gaming a test system to hit 999 call targets (911 for the rest of the world) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/17/two-g4s-police-control-room-staff-fired-over-999-test-calls https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/17/two-g4s-poli...
crdb 10y ago
> It sorta reminds me of how, when a "measure productivity by number of tickets closed" policy gets enacted, everyone just starts creating tickets for every menial thing they do. I had a client who did this and so I started logging everything, pasting the commits etc. with the start and end timestamp of each group of actions (e.g. "created X table, met these issues, solved them like this"). Then I looked at the log and realised I was putting in way too many hours compared to the contract because I wanted to get the job done well, and cut back to the hours they were paying for.
lervag 10y ago
Funny, I do something similar. At my work, I'm supposed to submit a time sheet every week through a web based economy system. The system is both slow and tedious and annoying as things may be, so me and a collegue wrote a python script to submit our time sheets from the command line. I've now coupled this with a personal journal system I use in Vim, so that I can submit my timesheets from within Vim every Friday. Very neat! The same economy system is also used for project management. I also have a script to download and parse the economy data for a project and present it to me in a meaningful manner, which means I pretty much never have to actually use our internal economy system.

mattmanser 10y ago

Yeah, incentivizing by tickets is always dangerous, coincidentally there was a story in the UK papers yesterday about employees gaming a test system to hit 999 call targets (911 for the rest of the world) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/17/two-g4s-police-control-room-staff-fired-over-999-test-calls https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/17/two-g4s-poli...

crdb 10y ago

> It sorta reminds me of how, when a "measure productivity by number of tickets closed" policy gets enacted, everyone just starts creating tickets for every menial thing they do. I had a client who did this and so I started logging everything, pasting the commits etc. with the start and end timestamp of each group of actions (e.g. "created X table, met these issues, solved them like this"). Then I looked at the log and realised I was putting in way too many hours compared to the contract because I wanted to get the job done well, and cut back to the hours they were paying for.

lervag 10y ago

Funny, I do something similar. At my work, I'm supposed to submit a time sheet every week through a web based economy system. The system is both slow and tedious and annoying as things may be, so me and a collegue wrote a python script to submit our time sheets from the command line. I've now coupled this with a personal journal system I use in Vim, so that I can submit my timesheets from within Vim every Friday. Very neat! The same economy system is also used for project management. I also have a script to download and parse the economy data for a project and present it to me in a meaningful manner, which means I pretty much never have to actually use our internal economy system.