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How Not to Do Time Tracking for Software Developers

152 points by encorekt 8y ago

tinaleaton 8y ago
I track my time, too, and my biggest complaint is how long it takes. I think it's a great idea for companies to show why time tracking matters so it doesn't feel so futile.
- howard941 8y ago
  If in the US definitely a company fail to inform. Done properly developer salary supported by time records can help qualify some portion of the salary for the R&D tax credit. At least that's what they tell us where I slave (a $FORTUNE_500) Where things fall apart for me is logging overhead time, like time spent waking up with the first cup of coffee while reading company emails or doing IT-ish tasks on my dev system. I have no idea how to account for those times that doesn't make a mockery of the "Other" time entry.
  - encorekt 8y ago
    I make those a pretty broad category -- "email" "time waste" (that one's just for me). If the time tracker is simplistic and intuitive enough, then it doesn't have to be a headache.
  - fwip 8y ago
    I'm fortunate to be in a place where our time-tracking is not expected to add up to 40 (or 80) hours a week. I log the work items I do, which sometimes is six hours and sometimes is one hour a day.
  - WWLink 8y ago
    Ugh. I don't ever want to work for a company where my time tracking has to be so fine grained that I have to log bathroom breaks. Holy shit that sounds like a nightmare!
    - cubano 8y ago
      I actually worked for a company where they didn't allow me to have a bathroom break during working hours while I was remoting...such is life as a 53yo developer trying to make any kind of living in this industry. In fact, I had to log X keystrokes and Y LOC every hour in order to be paid for that hour...talk about being a factory worker.
      - zdragnar 8y ago
        I hate to use the "you should be looking harder" trope, but every company I've worked at has had developers at or over 53, and not one of them had such onerous time tracking requirements. One tracked time to attempt to get r&d tax credits on certain work. The other was an agency that tracked time in case of disputes with unruly clients (such as the time we had gone through 3 project managers and 2 CFOs while we worked with them, and they were desperate to recover money from their own bad mistakes). The rest didn't track time at all. Not to mention that LOC as a metric has been an industry joke at least since the early 80's: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin... I've heard of funnier versions of that story, but haven't tracked them down yet.
      - 52-6F-62 8y ago
        That model doesn't even make sense to me. Some of the most productive hours are LOC removed. Counting keystrokes? That sounds nightmarish, man.
        lostlogin 8y ago
        Gets me thinking. Back space, I can see arguments for it being +1, 0, -1 or -2?
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        This is utter horror and is pretty much asking for people to quickly code up something to type fake keystrokes when you take a break.
      - 8y ago
  - anumberofopt 8y ago
    Lol, I remember being in a billable environment and making so much shit up. Reading emails? Billed to project Y. Bathroom break? Billed to project X. Politely listening to my boss gab? Billed to project Z. Now that I manage my own team I let them abuse the Other time entry. I only expect 70-80% billable anyways, which lines up with studies on productivity. Anybody expecting 100% productivity is an idiot and anybody reporting 100% productivity is a liar.
- arethuza 8y ago
  At one previous employer I submitted a feature request for the time tracker that would have saved a lot of time - it was a button that would generate something that was basically "like last week but with some plausible looking random changes". Now I think about it - should have been a cron job, maybe that was why it was rejected.
- mbrameld 8y ago
  What level of granularity are you required to track? I track how much time a spend working on a particular feature, regardless of the type of work being done. When I take a break or start working on a different feature I make a note of how long I worked since I started. It takes less time than writing a commit comment, which I usually do right before I jot down how long I worked on it.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Some companies just want a panopticon. Many of them want to micro-manage, and have weird ideas that software development is a direct correlation between time and effort. My current company it makes sense to try my best to the hour/half-hour, because we're consultants and that's how we bill our clients. A past employer for me was the worst of both worlds because they had a consultant's mindset towards billable hours having been born of a law firm, but not the consultant's approach to billing software development work. We were classified purely as "overhead" and not allowed to "bill" our (internal) clients. Meanwhile, despite starting life as a law firm it was by that point mostly a call center, and call staff to lofty law firm partners look like babies that need a strict panopticon.
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Time Tracking to 15 minutes or unicorn points in sprint estimation, beancounters will glom onto it and the stats will be juked, padded, and hoarded.
- teddyh 8y ago
  “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
janci 8y ago
My time tracking - LibreOffice calc spreadsheet. ctrl+; to insert date, ctrl+shift+; to insert start/end time. Two columns for project and task name. Takes like 5 seconds to make a log.
bradleyankrom 8y ago
cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:viP3hB4HPqMJ:https://www.7pace.com/blog/developer-time-tracking-fails&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:viP3hB4...
jSully24 8y ago
A very smimple approach previously discussed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519819
- hathawsh 8y ago
  That's cool! I'd opt for Minetest (a good open source clone of Minecraft) instead of Legos.
ams6110 8y ago
If you are an emacs/org-mode user, it's quite easy to clock in and out of tasks as you work, and generate summary reports of your time. I've done this with good success when I was required to track my time. If I'm not required to do it, I find that I just dont bother.
- arethuza 8y ago
  Org mode for VS Code has timestamps - which I use for keeping a record of when I thought of things rather than time tracking.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I used to have that problem but now that I'm freelancing, I actually take care to always have an active clock running on a task I'm working on. It's even improving my focus in a way - I have a constant reminder in my mode line (both in Emacs and in WM) what I'm focusing on. The key to making this work, when I couldn't make it work in Jira, is lack of friction. In Emacs, if I want to switch tasks I'm working on, it takes the following sequence of keypresses: C-a a -- switch to Org Agenda C-s taskn... <ret> -- find new task "taskname" via incremental search i -- clock in, automatically clocking out the previously active task s -- save all open org-mode files q -- close Org Agenda window It's in my muscle memory, and I can do that faster in there than it takes for a single Jira page to refresh (reason #123 I prefer desktop native over web apps, and don't consider the latter as proper tools).
Klathmon 8y ago
I'm curious if anyone here has had success with more "coarsely grained" time tracking? I've found that I'd have no issues tracking my time by day or at most half-day increments, especially since for the most part that's how I end up working on things in a lot of cases (as a developer, not a manager). I feel like it would give most of the same benefits with a magnitude less work, but I haven't ever tried it out in a real situation before and I'm curious if it holds up.
- mercer 8y ago
  I've had mixed results with more coarsely grained time tracking. On the one hand I'm more likely to actually do so when I don't have to clock in and out all the time. On the other hand, I kept forgetting to clock in or out because it wasn't 'regular' enough to do it automatically. These days I use Emacs org-mode for todo items and time tracking (+ pretty much everything else), which makes it much easier to be extremely granular in my tracking without having to expend much effort. Since I have my todo list in front of me for any task anyways, starting the clock is just one keystroke away. That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;). Between increased efficiency, less proverbial papercuts from alternative ways of doing things to cause your death, and things you just didn't do before you reduced your friction, switching to Emacs/Org-Mode has probably paid for itself many times over :).
- SatvikBeri 8y ago
  I've had great success tracking my team, and my team's time, by the day. On the level of "I'm working on project A, project A is now done and I'm now working on project B." It's obviously imperfect but it's good enough to prevent the edge cases, e.g. somebody spending a month on something low priority.
wdfx 8y ago
I took the approach of recording the type/category of work I am doing, and time it exactly using a tool I created for the purpose: https://doug.pacifico-hammond.co.uk/software/hardware/2018/06/24/the-task-switch.html https://doug.pacifico-hammond.co.uk/software/hardware/2018/0... As a lead/director it is rarely useful to know exactly which task I am working on, but better to know that I spend the right % of time on each project or type of work.
- acutesoftware 8y ago
  Nice! When I first saw this, my initial reaction was "cool but why would I do that". Thinking about it - it would be better than most software approaches due to the 'lower mental cost' for logging time. Even adding a spreadsheet row with macros takes a few clicks, but simply reaching over and pressing a physical button would be the fastest way to do this.
ColinWright 8y ago
(Edit: Yes, I know it's working now. That doesn't mean it wasn't working, and it doesn't mean this comment is invalid. It just means that it got fixed, perhaps even because of this comment pointing out the problem.) I'm getting this: Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to www.7pace.com. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Suggestions? Yes, I've read the article via the Google cache.
- zeta0134 8y ago
  No cypher overlap suggests that either 7pace's SSL settings (server side) are unusually restrictive, or your browser simply doesn't support those settings for other reasons. Could happen on older browsers maybe, or restrictive group policies on Windows, etc. Try a different browser perhaps?
  - ColinWright 8y ago
    Just tried again and it's worked this time. That suggests they had some of their settings wrong.
- 333c 8y ago
  Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/yFO6l https://archive.is/yFO6l I removed the s in https and it loaded but redirected to the https version, confusingly.
spork12 8y ago
"How not to setup SSL on your website"
tikumo 8y ago
wakatime! Just dont install the chrome extension haha.. i accidentally logged 197 hours on one customer..
himangshuj 8y ago
Haha, Apparently how not to host a website giving tech advice includes having SSL certificate error on the website
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  He had to choose between meeting his sprint "commitments" and keeping the website available. He prioritized just like management told him to.
jacobtwotwo 8y ago
I recommend activity-watch[0] if anyone wants a good, open-source, at-a-glance system of tracking for their own computer usage. It's definitely helped me rebuild a memory of my activities on days that got away from me. [0] https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
I’m not sure I understand the value prop here. It’s a time tracking software tool for software engineers? FTE or Contract? The UX also looks like complete shit. Get your stuff together bro, this is the worst pitch I’ve ever seen.
- enlyth 8y ago
  Why are you being so negative, I think the author makes valid points.
Zecar 8y ago
We do time tracking so we can bill our clients. To me it's a bit rewarding because I see exactly how my hourly work justifies my salary. Any other kind of time tracking that is shared with your employer is absolute proof that they don't trust you.
sagichmal 8y ago
Fuck everything about these breathless, one-sentence-per-paragraph articles. It's infuriating to read.
- jopsen 8y ago
  * I agree. * I only have time for bullet points :)
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  In this case it's a real bummer because it's as if a perfectly fine article was then cut into little pieces, with some of them swapping position. It takes very little to improve it lots, e.g. > We’re outspoken advocates for tracking time. After all, we are a team of software developers who willingly and knowingly created an application specifically for the purpose of time tracking, right? Our philosophy is simple: time tracking is like fitness tracking, it’s a way for you, as an individual, to assess yourself. We think that it’s totally normal and healthy for developers to want to own their time in a quantifiable way, measure their own abilities, and master their craft. > But it’s no secret that most developers have a visceral reaction to the very idea of tracking time, and the truth is that most companies do time tracking entirely wrong. The reason why developers hate tracking time so much and fight tooth-and-nail against the idea of having to log hours is because companies have royally screwed it up, they’ve taken a tool that could give people more ownership over their own work and distorted it into a mechanism for managers to exert control over their team. It’s like the company’s way of saying, “Sure, we trust you to do your job… but – just in case – we’re watching you.” What kind of employee-employer relationship do you think that creates? > With almost anything in life, there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way, and time tracking is absolutely no different. It can be an effective tool for helping developers own and improve their own abilities, but only if management resists the temptations to use it in other ways. In most cases, if the developers on your team hate time tracking, it’s because of how it’s being implemented (or because they have PTSD from a previous job where it was implemented poorly.)
- rhizome 8y ago
  Part 2 is about how not to write blog posts.
- 8y ago
rspoerri 8y ago
seems very much like native advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
ryandrake 8y ago
I got into the habit of keeping a daily work log, and continue to do so even though I no longer work for a company that requires it. Very simple: Date, number of hours (0.5 granularity), planned work, actual work done, links to work output or meeting notes (if any). That’s it. It helps me to get back up to speed after a weekend. It allows me to tell you what happened on that day X months ago when we were in the middle of project Y without searching my email for clues. It is very helpful for yearly performance reviews, allowing me to provide a detailed accounting of everything, big and small, that I did since last year. The self-assessment pretty much writes itself.
stesch 8y ago
At my last employment they had a time tracking software that said that three tasks @ 20 minutes each are 0.99… hours. Hmm. As a software developer you get really frustrated when you have to deal with this expensive piece of software.
- jgust 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if this was an intentional hack to get around some regulatory bullshit. >if we don't report whole number cap-ex hours on our return, we'll avoid an audit!
  - stesch 8y ago
    Nope. When the hours of the tasks didn't add up with the daily attendance you had to tweak your data or you couldn't close the day. Either added or removed 1 minute to the work day. So a work day with 8 hours maybe had 7.98 hours of tasks. You tweak around a bit so that they both matched. This was a reported bug (incl. explanation from a programmer) that wasn't fixed for a very long time. Maybe it's still broken.
- philjohn 8y ago
  Reminds me of the SAP software a previous employer used. One of my reports worked 4 days a week ... so if they took a half day of leave at any point come the end of the year they would typically have 0.499. or 0.999. left to take.
- dnautics 8y ago
  IEEE floating point is hard!!
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    It does seem a little aggressive to try to get an employee to do useful work in 2^-53 of an hour. First you'd need a keyboard that could report 25 trillion words per minute…
- Bartweiss 8y ago
tomphoolery 8y ago
Time tracking just makes developers better liars. It gives clients the room to be angry, fight contractual obligations, and essentially not pay for the development time.
whyisthewhat 8y ago
There is no technical fix that will make managerial time-tracking less of an exercise in control and relentless optimization at the expense of the developer. If you want to preserve some autonomy and dignity, you need to fundamentally restructure the relationship between yourself and management (like with, for instance, a ~union~).
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  I think this bears some elaboration because I feel the same way, but if we don't talk about _why_ we feel this way, it looks like we're spending our time playing video games and pretending we're working. ("After lunch I just... space out... for a couple of hours. But it looks like I'm working!") I spend a fair amount of time reading documentation; no matter how many programming languages or tools or environments I know, there's always something new to learn. This is true whether I want to learn something new or not - even if I were comfortable just using the stuff I knew when I graduated college, I'll eventually inherit or have to work with something that somebody who knows something newer wrote. As a result, learning new things, reading documentation, experimenting with unknown systems is part of the job - which is completely unappreciated. When I was younger, the managers would ask me what my plan for accomplishing task "X" was and I would start with, "Ok, the first thing I need to do is to learn the environment" and invariably they'd go apeshit when I suggested that I "waste" their time and money on something as pointless as "learning". If I was competent, I'd already know this stuff, and admitting that I needed to waste time reading documentation was sort of an admission of weakness. Of course, being young and naive, I'd try to reason with them but after years and years of having the same circular arguments I finally learned to give bland, inane responses like "research" and avoid giving specifics.
  - whyisthewhat 8y ago
    I agree that it’s perfectly reasonable to be expected to be able to give an account of how you spend your time. My point is simply that whether or not this becomes an exercise in serf-like dehumanization and Taylorism depends on the fundamental organizational structure of the workplace, not the technical details of its implementation.
devilshaircut 8y ago
The "How Knowledge Work Happens" graphic is really what resonates with me. I run a dev shop and I hate time tracking for the complexity implied in this image. Questions come to mind. What counts for time tracking and what doesn't? If I spend an hour emailing back and forth with a stakeholder, none of this is reflected in my GitHub activity. So there is a delta between what is billable time and the actual deliverable. What if I spend an hour researching a solution for a feature? Or debugging my environment? Again, that implies delta between billable time and the deliverable. What about my level of expertise? I might be a junior or senior level developer; I might have certain specialized knowledge in an area of programming (or lack it). Again, more delta that tracks closely to the specific logistics of a small feature and less with overall "time". Suppose I had a machine that strictly tracked the amount of time I spent "doing something project-related" (whatever the specific rubric). At the end of the day, I now have a number. What does this number actually tell me? I am not sure it is that useful and it definitely depends on however the rubric was defined (which would be inherently arbitrary anyway). To me, it makes sense to just allot hours to devs and trust that they are doing their jobs. When people stop doing their job, peers notice anyway, hour tracking or not.
guest13456 8y ago
I wrote once software to do the time tracing in reverse. I feed it with projects and how much I thought I was working on each project, and in generated timetables with accuracy needed by company for the whole week that matched the given project percentages. As a bonus, I had a generic list of comments to attach randomly to each slot. My manager was using those generated data to figure out the project time percentages I was working on. Circle closed. All happy.
elchief 8y ago
I worked for a Fortune 1000. Built a lead generation system that brings in $100M/year. They brought in time-tracking for our team, so I quit, because I hated it. The lead generation system fell apart without me, the Vice President and Project Manager in charge got fired. Nice job guys.
juandazapata 8y ago
/r/iamverysmart/
- aaomidi 8y ago
  Many products have a key person. It's not really surprising.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    I wouldn’t boast about writing software that “falls apart” by merely not having you around. Not exactly a high quality bar.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      I wouldn't read that much into it without even asking for elaboration, "it fell apart" can mean a lot of things including "they messed it up after I left". That it really just fell apart under its own weight without anyone doing anything is probably the weakest plausible interpretation of what they wrote. After all, if it brought in $100M/year yet was of low quality, why didn't they hire some people to recreate a better version of the thing real quick?
      - amnah 8y ago
        Well he did said > fell apart without me
    - mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
      Well, if he's the sole maintainer and they don't replace him, falling apart is inevitable. Software dies when its dependencies do and that doesn't imply low quality.
      - user5994461 8y ago
        Dependencies take many years to move. It's rotting slowly, not falling apart. A software that brings a hundred million dollars couldn't fall apart, the company would get guys to reboot the server and have a look. The rare cases of software suddenly dying is when the source code and/or the setup is lost. The software or the database stops one day and nobody can figure out how to start it again. There is a lot of blame to put on both development and management for reaching this situation.
QuadrupleA 8y ago
Sorry, couldn't get past the arrogant know-it-all writing style. "With almost anything in life, there's a right way to do things and a wrong way." Is that so, Socrates? I'd say the opposite, with almost anything in life there are complex and subtle tradeoffs and many good alternatives. Absolute, black-and-white thinking (and writing) is comforting but narrowminded.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
_bxg1 8y ago
I just make mine super vague. I put in the number of hours I was in the office, and I summarize most days with some variation on "Made improvements and bug fixes". That's the only way I can spend time doing anything other than actively writing code without stressing out about it.
- welder 8y ago
  Sounds like WakaTime can help you. It's an automatic time tracker for programmers, but the part you would like: It shows when you started and stopped working for the day. An example chart: https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding-activity https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding-ac...
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    I just look at the clock when I arrive, round to the nearest quarter hour, and unless there's something pressing I leave 8 hour later
bm98 8y ago
Tracking time is part and parcel of being a consultant, at least if you have multiple clients and overlapping work. After doing it for 15+ years, I've tried it all - everything from the spreadsheet, to the apps, to forgetting and having to go back and reconstruct. I read this article and I think it's missing the point about what's so hard about time tracking. What's hard is: Implementing the trigger on the context switch. You're working on one thing, something happens and you make a context switch to something else - and in order to track your time, you need a trigger to fire to prompt you to record the switch. It doesn't matter if it's in a spreadsheet or an app or on a piece of paper - I find that my brain doesn't fire that trigger very reliably. Especially if I'm busy. If someone can solve that problem with a fancy app, I'd be impressed! I've said it in another thread [1]: I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790918
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  100% agree with the trigger being the hard part, and with wanting the observer robot. I know there are partial solutions (RescueTime is a big one) which watch your text editor, or watch your web browser, or suck in meeting data from your calendar, but I've never really been that happy with them. The further complicating wrinkle for me personally is that I work at a robotics company, so I spend a bunch of time at ssh terminals to remote machines (robots, shared VMs, etc) where it is neither practical nor desirable to install vim plugins hooked up to my personal time tracking setup. So I'd love for the observer to be able to be able to also watch my remote shell sessions and record things like which file paths I'm editing and commands I'm invoking, from which I could fairly easily construct rules about which general problem area I'm working in.
  - wogg 8y ago
    If you have RescueTime window titles / details enabled for your terminal app, and have configured your terminal app (if it supports it) to promote active shell command to window title, you get this details, regardless of where you are ssh'd to. Works for me at least on macOS + iTerm2.
sz4kerto 8y ago
I'll certainly bill my long weekend runs where I get most of my best ideas.
throwaway923j 8y ago
I have a problem with these articles often not because I disagree in principle that knowledge workers need to lose autonomy and become mere pawns of management, but because the authors so often argue something like: Our job is so different and special from manual labor that we deserve special privileges and respect. All workers deserve autonomy and respect, should resist work "speed ups" at management's insistence, and should demand sane working conditions. We should show a united front across all sectors, not try to claim that our job is special.
Sylamore 8y ago
Nothing beats that time our company had us filling out 3 different time tracking systems at the same time and complaining that some of us were adding time tracking as a task that required time tracking.
- throwmeback 8y ago
  And there I was feeling weird having to manage 2 time trackers at work.
briatx 8y ago
I've been pretty happy tracking billable hours with Grindstone.
dahart 8y ago
> It’s like the company’s way of saying, “Sure, we trust you to do your job….but–just in case–we’re watching you.” This feels hyperbolic. There are legitimate reasons to measure time spent, and it doesn't amount to lack of trust. And similarly, failure to meet time expectations doesn't amount to shirking or lying. That said, I personally think it's wise to track your own time for a variety of reasons, one of which is to have some defense against someone else's measurements. I worked at a game studio where the employees were on average reporting 60+ hours of work. The managers wanted to verify the survey data, so they implemented opaque time tracking (meaning they didn't show the employees the data, and they anonymized the data and didn't use it to come down on individuals, only to collect aggregate information.) The result was that employees were factoring their commutes as well as optimistic expected arrival and departure times, and fairly dramatically over-estimating how much they actually worked. The average was much closer to 40, and 25% of the company was working less than 40 during final production crunch. I personally tracked my own time at the same time, and it turns out I was also working less than I thought. There's no doubt that crunch feels like more work, but measuring revealed a discrepancy between feelings and reality.
- wolco 8y ago
  I didn't realize that most were working 9-5 or some variation or less in the game industry. Do you find on most days you usually work 8 hours and leave. You work an hour extra one day but leave an hour earlier on friday?
  - dahart 8y ago
    I wouldn't generalize to the industry, this data point is specific to one studio I worked at. And most were working some overtime, just not quite as much as they thought. Only a minority were working 40 or less. Personally, I was working much more than 40. I thought I was working 75-80 hours, but it was closer to 60-65 at the time. It legitimately felt like 75 even though I know exactly what 80 hours a week feels like, even though I had worked those kinds of hours for long stretches before that. One of the issues is that during crunch when people start staying late, often they start coming in later as well, so the day slides. The studio would buy dinner at 7 for the employees staying late, so quite a few people would roll in around 10:30 and leave after dinner. They felt like they were working a lot of overtime because they were staying late, but not accounting for coming in a bit late.
quickthrower2 8y ago
I quit 3 jobs in the last 5 years and time tracking by management is high up on the reason list. I will now refuse to work for any organisation that does it. The code and design quality turns to shit in such places. Everyone is trying to keep to the beat of their allotted time. Here’s your shovel. Dig a tonne of soil. You have 2 hours. No one is thinking of hiring a JCB because well thinking about that takes time from your time tracked task. Places that don’t track time probably get better results although they can’t prove it with metrics. Compare it to parenting, why aren’t we timing nappy/diaper changes? Oh because it’s mostly instinctive. A bit like programming! Sure we need to make sure we are on track but this can be done at much a higher level. Story points used properly fill this goal. Where I work we use them but there is no punishment for not meeting the story points. Not even a frown of disappointment that when we added up some numbers from a random distribution, they didn’t add up to some arbitrary number. Story points are a useful indicator, but they are part of a vector of information. We didn’t meet the story points because we worked on some technical debt, because ... for example. So in conclusion don’t you dare track my time and pull me in a room because I didn’t dig that hole quick enough.
JamesLeonis 8y ago
The crux of the story is this sentence: "They’ve taken a tool that could give people more ownership over their own work and distorted it into a mechanism for managers to exert control over their team." This is true for every company, no matter the tool. This could equally apply to a Methodology, meetings, deliverables, timelines, or any other top-down approach designed around coercion. I'm reminded on Tom DeMarco's thoughts about Control and what kind of projects need such controls [1]: To understand control’s real role, you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects: - Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million. - Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million. What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value. Can I really be saying that it’s OK to run projects without control or with relatively little control? Almost. I’m suggesting that first we need to select projects where precise control won’t matter so much. Then we need to reduce our expectations for exactly how much we’re going to be able to control them, no matter how assiduously we apply ourselves to control. [1]: https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep...
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Caveat though: in a competitive market, all projects will tend to move towards margins of Project A (or worse). When all low-hanging fruits are long gone, and bosses are still trying to optimize some more, tightening control to eliminate variance starts to make sense... for the company. It seems to me that human values like happiness and respect can only exist where a market isn't efficient yet. It certainly seems so if you look at worker treatment vs. margins/competitiveness.
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    Isn't the point of unions/minimum wages designed to artificially lift the floor (or lower ceiling of efficiency) of an efficient market to keep human values of happiness and respect decent? I suppose then you're still left with competitiveness between countries.
kardianos 8y ago
I'm a programmer. I also sometimes manage others. Time tracking and continuous code code review is an important way to spot workers who can't stay on task or are way over their head. If you can catch issues early, you can help them and the team succeed. If you lack time tracking and continuous code review many developers will "fall through the cracks" and it will take much longer to discover they are a net negative to the team. Even if it becomes apparent, it becomes much easier to point to sometime somewhat objective then gut feelings. Time tracking is good for accountability. Time tracking should be simple. Time tracking should only loosely be associated with tasks. * Email 0:45 * Meet with customer 1:00 * Program Complete solution and deploy it (TASK045) 0:05 I would be very wary of developers who refuse to accurately track their time.
- wolco 8y ago
  Tracking at the microlevel is horrible. The time wasted keeping up and the padding in explainable areas to offset the undocumented task like pick up phone, talk to coworker, get water, go to bathroom, answer question. In your example email took 15 minutes in reality it took 1 minute and I've used 14 minutes to get a coffee speak to an employee about upcoming company bake sale, holding the door for the CEO and getting to the conference room 5 minutes early to meet the client.
keithnz 8y ago
I'd be really interested to know ( I was going to do a Ask HN ) on who has to track their time at work, how big the company is you work for, what detail do you track to and whether you think it's useful and if so, how is it useful?. I personally work in a semi small product based company and we don't track time, but we have a few "point in time goals" where we need to get a solution sorted by a specific date. I started with extreme programming in 2000 and used to use the planning ideas and velocity indicators, which is okish, but kind of a blunt tool. However the real mechanism to deal with problems is scope management. So now I just work on the idea of continuous focusing on goals and scope management of those goals. This works pretty well in a small team and time frames that are not too long (2 - 3 months). However a lot of our development is purely feature based, which is often not time critical, but are scope managed to what I'd call "worthwhile" increments So instead of worrying about time, my emphasis is goals/focus, feedback on progress and scope management. This tends to lead to good time outcomes.
welder 8y ago
> Click to start. Click to stop. That's the problem right on their website[1]. Developers shouldn't have to waste time manually time tracking, it's been automated already[2]. Unless your programmers' time isn't worth much, you're better off not manually time tracking at all. Due to context switching, manual time tracking actually hurts overall productivity. I've heard people say they get in the habit of manually time tracking and don't think about it anymore, but that's just getting into the habit of getting distracted from the real work: shipping changes. [1]: https://www.7pace.com/timetracker https://www.7pace.com/timetracker [2]: Many tools already exist for automatic time tracking.
smichael 8y ago
I keep a hledger timedot file[1] open in a hot-key drop-down iTerm window. Each 15-minute chunk is logged with a dot. I group dots into hours for quick visual scanning. 2019-01-08 fos.hledger.sup . adm.email .. adm.finance .... .... .. fos.plaintextaccounting . fos.hledger.issues.941 .... . has-res ... biz-res .. I've trained myself to update this often while at the computer, and before walking away. Delayed retroactive logging is also pretty easy. Working in quarter/half/whole hour chunks, and in rhythm with the clock, and having a pane showing recent sleep/wake/timelog-saved events, all help. Not every day is the same; this system has been quick and flexible enough to suit a range of conditions. I can set daily/weekly/monthly time budgets if I want. Some more details at [2]. [1] http://hledger.org/timedot.html http://hledger.org/timedot.html [2] http://hledger.org/Time-planning.html#simons-hledger-time-dashboard-201805 http://hledger.org/Time-planning.html#simons-hledger-time-da...
chrisbennet 8y ago
I just went through this with a client. They have something called Team Work which is fine for tracking hours. What wasn’t good is they wanted all time accounted for and they wouldn’t let you add new tasks, management had to add them. So if you wanted to fill out the task honestly (“changed font”), you would need to get the PM to add the new task. So to record 20 minutes of “new task” would require at least another 20 minutes to find the PM for that project and have him add it. I eventually solved the problem by telling them I would finish the current project but “this isn’t working for me”. Poof, no more time tracking requirement.
triviatise 8y ago
we are experimentng with timeular https://timeular.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryNJfX4e6DaIGgOwF1vlpbkEzLcPsXz48jmJcKk17MyWr__I3feUvRoCoBoQAvD_BwE https://timeular.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryNJfX4e... It is an 8 (or more) sided shape that you flip to change tasks. The jury is still out as the people who are testing it havent had time to set it up..
rurban 8y ago
But the best came at the end: "If you really want to demoralize your engineering team and galvanize their distrust for time tracking and management, then you can use their time sheet data against them. Call them into a meeting. Pour over their time entries line by line and pick apart how they spent their week." => Useless meetings are much worse than useless timetrackers.
krudnicki 8y ago
I created https://www.timecamp.com https://www.timecamp.com that can track processes, window titles and url (free). Those informations presented visually can help make better timesheets :)

152 points by encorekt 8y ago

I track my time, too, and my biggest complaint is how long it takes. I think it's a great idea for companies to show why time tracking matters so it doesn't feel so futile.

howard941 8y ago
If in the US definitely a company fail to inform. Done properly developer salary supported by time records can help qualify some portion of the salary for the R&D tax credit. At least that's what they tell us where I slave (a $FORTUNE_500) Where things fall apart for me is logging overhead time, like time spent waking up with the first cup of coffee while reading company emails or doing IT-ish tasks on my dev system. I have no idea how to account for those times that doesn't make a mockery of the "Other" time entry.
- encorekt 8y ago
  I make those a pretty broad category -- "email" "time waste" (that one's just for me). If the time tracker is simplistic and intuitive enough, then it doesn't have to be a headache.
- fwip 8y ago
  I'm fortunate to be in a place where our time-tracking is not expected to add up to 40 (or 80) hours a week. I log the work items I do, which sometimes is six hours and sometimes is one hour a day.
- WWLink 8y ago
  Ugh. I don't ever want to work for a company where my time tracking has to be so fine grained that I have to log bathroom breaks. Holy shit that sounds like a nightmare!
  - cubano 8y ago
    I actually worked for a company where they didn't allow me to have a bathroom break during working hours while I was remoting...such is life as a 53yo developer trying to make any kind of living in this industry. In fact, I had to log X keystrokes and Y LOC every hour in order to be paid for that hour...talk about being a factory worker.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      I hate to use the "you should be looking harder" trope, but every company I've worked at has had developers at or over 53, and not one of them had such onerous time tracking requirements. One tracked time to attempt to get r&d tax credits on certain work. The other was an agency that tracked time in case of disputes with unruly clients (such as the time we had gone through 3 project managers and 2 CFOs while we worked with them, and they were desperate to recover money from their own bad mistakes). The rest didn't track time at all. Not to mention that LOC as a metric has been an industry joke at least since the early 80's: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin... I've heard of funnier versions of that story, but haven't tracked them down yet.
    - 52-6F-62 8y ago
      That model doesn't even make sense to me. Some of the most productive hours are LOC removed. Counting keystrokes? That sounds nightmarish, man.
      - lostlogin 8y ago
        Gets me thinking. Back space, I can see arguments for it being +1, 0, -1 or -2?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        This is utter horror and is pretty much asking for people to quickly code up something to type fake keystrokes when you take a break.
    - 8y ago
- anumberofopt 8y ago
  Lol, I remember being in a billable environment and making so much shit up. Reading emails? Billed to project Y. Bathroom break? Billed to project X. Politely listening to my boss gab? Billed to project Z. Now that I manage my own team I let them abuse the Other time entry. I only expect 70-80% billable anyways, which lines up with studies on productivity. Anybody expecting 100% productivity is an idiot and anybody reporting 100% productivity is a liar.
arethuza 8y ago
At one previous employer I submitted a feature request for the time tracker that would have saved a lot of time - it was a button that would generate something that was basically "like last week but with some plausible looking random changes". Now I think about it - should have been a cron job, maybe that was why it was rejected.
mbrameld 8y ago
What level of granularity are you required to track? I track how much time a spend working on a particular feature, regardless of the type of work being done. When I take a break or start working on a different feature I make a note of how long I worked since I started. It takes less time than writing a commit comment, which I usually do right before I jot down how long I worked on it.
WorldMaker 8y ago
Some companies just want a panopticon. Many of them want to micro-manage, and have weird ideas that software development is a direct correlation between time and effort. My current company it makes sense to try my best to the hour/half-hour, because we're consultants and that's how we bill our clients. A past employer for me was the worst of both worlds because they had a consultant's mindset towards billable hours having been born of a law firm, but not the consultant's approach to billing software development work. We were classified purely as "overhead" and not allowed to "bill" our (internal) clients. Meanwhile, despite starting life as a law firm it was by that point mostly a call center, and call staff to lofty law firm partners look like babies that need a strict panopticon.

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

Time Tracking to 15 minutes or unicorn points in sprint estimation, beancounters will glom onto it and the stats will be juked, padded, and hoarded.

teddyh 8y ago
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

janci 8y ago

My time tracking - LibreOffice calc spreadsheet. ctrl+; to insert date, ctrl+shift+; to insert start/end time. Two columns for project and task name. Takes like 5 seconds to make a log.

bradleyankrom 8y ago

cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:viP3hB4HPqMJ:https://www.7pace.com/blog/developer-time-tracking-fails&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:viP3hB4...

jSully24 8y ago

A very smimple approach previously discussed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519819

hathawsh 8y ago
That's cool! I'd opt for Minetest (a good open source clone of Minecraft) instead of Legos.

ams6110 8y ago

If you are an emacs/org-mode user, it's quite easy to clock in and out of tasks as you work, and generate summary reports of your time. I've done this with good success when I was required to track my time. If I'm not required to do it, I find that I just dont bother.

arethuza 8y ago
Org mode for VS Code has timestamps - which I use for keeping a record of when I thought of things rather than time tracking.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
I used to have that problem but now that I'm freelancing, I actually take care to always have an active clock running on a task I'm working on. It's even improving my focus in a way - I have a constant reminder in my mode line (both in Emacs and in WM) what I'm focusing on. The key to making this work, when I couldn't make it work in Jira, is lack of friction. In Emacs, if I want to switch tasks I'm working on, it takes the following sequence of keypresses: C-a a -- switch to Org Agenda C-s taskn... <ret> -- find new task "taskname" via incremental search i -- clock in, automatically clocking out the previously active task s -- save all open org-mode files q -- close Org Agenda window It's in my muscle memory, and I can do that faster in there than it takes for a single Jira page to refresh (reason #123 I prefer desktop native over web apps, and don't consider the latter as proper tools).

Klathmon 8y ago

I'm curious if anyone here has had success with more "coarsely grained" time tracking? I've found that I'd have no issues tracking my time by day or at most half-day increments, especially since for the most part that's how I end up working on things in a lot of cases (as a developer, not a manager). I feel like it would give most of the same benefits with a magnitude less work, but I haven't ever tried it out in a real situation before and I'm curious if it holds up.

mercer 8y ago
I've had mixed results with more coarsely grained time tracking. On the one hand I'm more likely to actually do so when I don't have to clock in and out all the time. On the other hand, I kept forgetting to clock in or out because it wasn't 'regular' enough to do it automatically. These days I use Emacs org-mode for todo items and time tracking (+ pretty much everything else), which makes it much easier to be extremely granular in my tracking without having to expend much effort. Since I have my todo list in front of me for any task anyways, starting the clock is just one keystroke away. That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;).
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > That said, I try to keep myself from calculating how much time I 'need' to save to offset the time it took me to get everything set up and to get comfortable with Emacs/Org-Mode ;). Between increased efficiency, less proverbial papercuts from alternative ways of doing things to cause your death, and things you just didn't do before you reduced your friction, switching to Emacs/Org-Mode has probably paid for itself many times over :).
SatvikBeri 8y ago
I've had great success tracking my team, and my team's time, by the day. On the level of "I'm working on project A, project A is now done and I'm now working on project B." It's obviously imperfect but it's good enough to prevent the edge cases, e.g. somebody spending a month on something low priority.

wdfx 8y ago

I took the approach of recording the type/category of work I am doing, and time it exactly using a tool I created for the purpose: https://doug.pacifico-hammond.co.uk/software/hardware/2018/06/24/the-task-switch.html https://doug.pacifico-hammond.co.uk/software/hardware/2018/0... As a lead/director it is rarely useful to know exactly which task I am working on, but better to know that I spend the right % of time on each project or type of work.

acutesoftware 8y ago
Nice! When I first saw this, my initial reaction was "cool but why would I do that". Thinking about it - it would be better than most software approaches due to the 'lower mental cost' for logging time. Even adding a spreadsheet row with macros takes a few clicks, but simply reaching over and pressing a physical button would be the fastest way to do this.

ColinWright 8y ago

(Edit: Yes, I know it's working now. That doesn't mean it wasn't working, and it doesn't mean this comment is invalid. It just means that it got fixed, perhaps even because of this comment pointing out the problem.) I'm getting this: Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to www.7pace.com. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Suggestions? Yes, I've read the article via the Google cache.

zeta0134 8y ago
No cypher overlap suggests that either 7pace's SSL settings (server side) are unusually restrictive, or your browser simply doesn't support those settings for other reasons. Could happen on older browsers maybe, or restrictive group policies on Windows, etc. Try a different browser perhaps?
- ColinWright 8y ago
  Just tried again and it's worked this time. That suggests they had some of their settings wrong.
333c 8y ago
Here's an archive link: https://archive.is/yFO6l https://archive.is/yFO6l I removed the s in https and it loaded but redirected to the https version, confusingly.

spork12 8y ago

"How not to setup SSL on your website"

tikumo 8y ago

wakatime! Just dont install the chrome extension haha.. i accidentally logged 197 hours on one customer..

himangshuj 8y ago

Haha, Apparently how not to host a website giving tech advice includes having SSL certificate error on the website

commandlinefan 8y ago
He had to choose between meeting his sprint "commitments" and keeping the website available. He prioritized just like management told him to.

jacobtwotwo 8y ago

I recommend activity-watch[0] if anyone wants a good, open-source, at-a-glance system of tracking for their own computer usage. It's definitely helped me rebuild a memory of my activities on days that got away from me. [0] https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

I’m not sure I understand the value prop here. It’s a time tracking software tool for software engineers? FTE or Contract? The UX also looks like complete shit. Get your stuff together bro, this is the worst pitch I’ve ever seen.

enlyth 8y ago
Why are you being so negative, I think the author makes valid points.

Zecar 8y ago

We do time tracking so we can bill our clients. To me it's a bit rewarding because I see exactly how my hourly work justifies my salary. Any other kind of time tracking that is shared with your employer is absolute proof that they don't trust you.

sagichmal 8y ago

Fuck everything about these breathless, one-sentence-per-paragraph articles. It's infuriating to read.

jopsen 8y ago
* I agree. * I only have time for bullet points :)
PavlovsCat 8y ago
In this case it's a real bummer because it's as if a perfectly fine article was then cut into little pieces, with some of them swapping position. It takes very little to improve it lots, e.g. > We’re outspoken advocates for tracking time. After all, we are a team of software developers who willingly and knowingly created an application specifically for the purpose of time tracking, right? Our philosophy is simple: time tracking is like fitness tracking, it’s a way for you, as an individual, to assess yourself. We think that it’s totally normal and healthy for developers to want to own their time in a quantifiable way, measure their own abilities, and master their craft. > But it’s no secret that most developers have a visceral reaction to the very idea of tracking time, and the truth is that most companies do time tracking entirely wrong. The reason why developers hate tracking time so much and fight tooth-and-nail against the idea of having to log hours is because companies have royally screwed it up, they’ve taken a tool that could give people more ownership over their own work and distorted it into a mechanism for managers to exert control over their team. It’s like the company’s way of saying, “Sure, we trust you to do your job… but – just in case – we’re watching you.” What kind of employee-employer relationship do you think that creates? > With almost anything in life, there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way, and time tracking is absolutely no different. It can be an effective tool for helping developers own and improve their own abilities, but only if management resists the temptations to use it in other ways. In most cases, if the developers on your team hate time tracking, it’s because of how it’s being implemented (or because they have PTSD from a previous job where it was implemented poorly.)
rhizome 8y ago
Part 2 is about how not to write blog posts.
8y ago

rspoerri 8y ago

seems very much like native advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

ryandrake 8y ago

I got into the habit of keeping a daily work log, and continue to do so even though I no longer work for a company that requires it. Very simple: Date, number of hours (0.5 granularity), planned work, actual work done, links to work output or meeting notes (if any). That’s it. It helps me to get back up to speed after a weekend. It allows me to tell you what happened on that day X months ago when we were in the middle of project Y without searching my email for clues. It is very helpful for yearly performance reviews, allowing me to provide a detailed accounting of everything, big and small, that I did since last year. The self-assessment pretty much writes itself.

stesch 8y ago

At my last employment they had a time tracking software that said that three tasks @ 20 minutes each are 0.99… hours. Hmm. As a software developer you get really frustrated when you have to deal with this expensive piece of software.

jgust 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this was an intentional hack to get around some regulatory bullshit. >if we don't report whole number cap-ex hours on our return, we'll avoid an audit!
- stesch 8y ago
  Nope. When the hours of the tasks didn't add up with the daily attendance you had to tweak your data or you couldn't close the day. Either added or removed 1 minute to the work day. So a work day with 8 hours maybe had 7.98 hours of tasks. You tweak around a bit so that they both matched. This was a reported bug (incl. explanation from a programmer) that wasn't fixed for a very long time. Maybe it's still broken.
philjohn 8y ago
Reminds me of the SAP software a previous employer used. One of my reports worked 4 days a week ... so if they took a half day of leave at any point come the end of the year they would typically have 0.499. or 0.999. left to take.
dnautics 8y ago
IEEE floating point is hard!!
- erik_seaberg 8y ago
  It does seem a little aggressive to try to get an employee to do useful work in 2^-53 of an hour. First you'd need a keyboard that could report 25 trillion words per minute…
Bartweiss 8y ago

tomphoolery 8y ago

Time tracking just makes developers better liars. It gives clients the room to be angry, fight contractual obligations, and essentially not pay for the development time.

whyisthewhat 8y ago

There is no technical fix that will make managerial time-tracking less of an exercise in control and relentless optimization at the expense of the developer. If you want to preserve some autonomy and dignity, you need to fundamentally restructure the relationship between yourself and management (like with, for instance, a ~union~).

commandlinefan 8y ago
I think this bears some elaboration because I feel the same way, but if we don't talk about _why_ we feel this way, it looks like we're spending our time playing video games and pretending we're working. ("After lunch I just... space out... for a couple of hours. But it looks like I'm working!") I spend a fair amount of time reading documentation; no matter how many programming languages or tools or environments I know, there's always something new to learn. This is true whether I want to learn something new or not - even if I were comfortable just using the stuff I knew when I graduated college, I'll eventually inherit or have to work with something that somebody who knows something newer wrote. As a result, learning new things, reading documentation, experimenting with unknown systems is part of the job - which is completely unappreciated. When I was younger, the managers would ask me what my plan for accomplishing task "X" was and I would start with, "Ok, the first thing I need to do is to learn the environment" and invariably they'd go apeshit when I suggested that I "waste" their time and money on something as pointless as "learning". If I was competent, I'd already know this stuff, and admitting that I needed to waste time reading documentation was sort of an admission of weakness. Of course, being young and naive, I'd try to reason with them but after years and years of having the same circular arguments I finally learned to give bland, inane responses like "research" and avoid giving specifics.
- whyisthewhat 8y ago
  I agree that it’s perfectly reasonable to be expected to be able to give an account of how you spend your time. My point is simply that whether or not this becomes an exercise in serf-like dehumanization and Taylorism depends on the fundamental organizational structure of the workplace, not the technical details of its implementation.

devilshaircut 8y ago

The "How Knowledge Work Happens" graphic is really what resonates with me. I run a dev shop and I hate time tracking for the complexity implied in this image. Questions come to mind. What counts for time tracking and what doesn't? If I spend an hour emailing back and forth with a stakeholder, none of this is reflected in my GitHub activity. So there is a delta between what is billable time and the actual deliverable. What if I spend an hour researching a solution for a feature? Or debugging my environment? Again, that implies delta between billable time and the deliverable. What about my level of expertise? I might be a junior or senior level developer; I might have certain specialized knowledge in an area of programming (or lack it). Again, more delta that tracks closely to the specific logistics of a small feature and less with overall "time". Suppose I had a machine that strictly tracked the amount of time I spent "doing something project-related" (whatever the specific rubric). At the end of the day, I now have a number. What does this number actually tell me? I am not sure it is that useful and it definitely depends on however the rubric was defined (which would be inherently arbitrary anyway). To me, it makes sense to just allot hours to devs and trust that they are doing their jobs. When people stop doing their job, peers notice anyway, hour tracking or not.

guest13456 8y ago

I wrote once software to do the time tracing in reverse. I feed it with projects and how much I thought I was working on each project, and in generated timetables with accuracy needed by company for the whole week that matched the given project percentages. As a bonus, I had a generic list of comments to attach randomly to each slot. My manager was using those generated data to figure out the project time percentages I was working on. Circle closed. All happy.

elchief 8y ago

I worked for a Fortune 1000. Built a lead generation system that brings in $100M/year. They brought in time-tracking for our team, so I quit, because I hated it. The lead generation system fell apart without me, the Vice President and Project Manager in charge got fired. Nice job guys.

juandazapata 8y ago

/r/iamverysmart/

aaomidi 8y ago
Many products have a key person. It's not really surprising.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  I wouldn’t boast about writing software that “falls apart” by merely not having you around. Not exactly a high quality bar.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    I wouldn't read that much into it without even asking for elaboration, "it fell apart" can mean a lot of things including "they messed it up after I left". That it really just fell apart under its own weight without anyone doing anything is probably the weakest plausible interpretation of what they wrote. After all, if it brought in $100M/year yet was of low quality, why didn't they hire some people to recreate a better version of the thing real quick?
    - amnah 8y ago
      Well he did said > fell apart without me
  - mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
    Well, if he's the sole maintainer and they don't replace him, falling apart is inevitable. Software dies when its dependencies do and that doesn't imply low quality.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      Dependencies take many years to move. It's rotting slowly, not falling apart. A software that brings a hundred million dollars couldn't fall apart, the company would get guys to reboot the server and have a look. The rare cases of software suddenly dying is when the source code and/or the setup is lost. The software or the database stops one day and nobody can figure out how to start it again. There is a lot of blame to put on both development and management for reaching this situation.

QuadrupleA 8y ago

Sorry, couldn't get past the arrogant know-it-all writing style. "With almost anything in life, there's a right way to do things and a wrong way." Is that so, Socrates? I'd say the opposite, with almost anything in life there are complex and subtle tradeoffs and many good alternatives. Absolute, black-and-white thinking (and writing) is comforting but narrowminded.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

_bxg1 8y ago

I just make mine super vague. I put in the number of hours I was in the office, and I summarize most days with some variation on "Made improvements and bug fixes". That's the only way I can spend time doing anything other than actively writing code without stressing out about it.

welder 8y ago
Sounds like WakaTime can help you. It's an automatic time tracker for programmers, but the part you would like: It shows when you started and stopped working for the day. An example chart: https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding-activity https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding-ac...
- _bxg1 8y ago
  I just look at the clock when I arrive, round to the nearest quarter hour, and unless there's something pressing I leave 8 hour later

bm98 8y ago

Tracking time is part and parcel of being a consultant, at least if you have multiple clients and overlapping work. After doing it for 15+ years, I've tried it all - everything from the spreadsheet, to the apps, to forgetting and having to go back and reconstruct. I read this article and I think it's missing the point about what's so hard about time tracking. What's hard is: Implementing the trigger on the context switch. You're working on one thing, something happens and you make a context switch to something else - and in order to track your time, you need a trigger to fire to prompt you to record the switch. It doesn't matter if it's in a spreadsheet or an app or on a piece of paper - I find that my brain doesn't fire that trigger very reliably. Especially if I'm busy. If someone can solve that problem with a fancy app, I'd be impressed! I've said it in another thread [1]: I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790918

mikepurvis 8y ago
100% agree with the trigger being the hard part, and with wanting the observer robot. I know there are partial solutions (RescueTime is a big one) which watch your text editor, or watch your web browser, or suck in meeting data from your calendar, but I've never really been that happy with them. The further complicating wrinkle for me personally is that I work at a robotics company, so I spend a bunch of time at ssh terminals to remote machines (robots, shared VMs, etc) where it is neither practical nor desirable to install vim plugins hooked up to my personal time tracking setup. So I'd love for the observer to be able to be able to also watch my remote shell sessions and record things like which file paths I'm editing and commands I'm invoking, from which I could fairly easily construct rules about which general problem area I'm working in.
- wogg 8y ago
  If you have RescueTime window titles / details enabled for your terminal app, and have configured your terminal app (if it supports it) to promote active shell command to window title, you get this details, regardless of where you are ssh'd to. Works for me at least on macOS + iTerm2.

sz4kerto 8y ago

I'll certainly bill my long weekend runs where I get most of my best ideas.

throwaway923j 8y ago

I have a problem with these articles often not because I disagree in principle that knowledge workers need to lose autonomy and become mere pawns of management, but because the authors so often argue something like: Our job is so different and special from manual labor that we deserve special privileges and respect. All workers deserve autonomy and respect, should resist work "speed ups" at management's insistence, and should demand sane working conditions. We should show a united front across all sectors, not try to claim that our job is special.

Sylamore 8y ago

Nothing beats that time our company had us filling out 3 different time tracking systems at the same time and complaining that some of us were adding time tracking as a task that required time tracking.

throwmeback 8y ago
And there I was feeling weird having to manage 2 time trackers at work.

briatx 8y ago

I've been pretty happy tracking billable hours with Grindstone.

dahart 8y ago

> It’s like the company’s way of saying, “Sure, we trust you to do your job….but–just in case–we’re watching you.” This feels hyperbolic. There are legitimate reasons to measure time spent, and it doesn't amount to lack of trust. And similarly, failure to meet time expectations doesn't amount to shirking or lying. That said, I personally think it's wise to track your own time for a variety of reasons, one of which is to have some defense against someone else's measurements. I worked at a game studio where the employees were on average reporting 60+ hours of work. The managers wanted to verify the survey data, so they implemented opaque time tracking (meaning they didn't show the employees the data, and they anonymized the data and didn't use it to come down on individuals, only to collect aggregate information.) The result was that employees were factoring their commutes as well as optimistic expected arrival and departure times, and fairly dramatically over-estimating how much they actually worked. The average was much closer to 40, and 25% of the company was working less than 40 during final production crunch. I personally tracked my own time at the same time, and it turns out I was also working less than I thought. There's no doubt that crunch feels like more work, but measuring revealed a discrepancy between feelings and reality.

wolco 8y ago
I didn't realize that most were working 9-5 or some variation or less in the game industry. Do you find on most days you usually work 8 hours and leave. You work an hour extra one day but leave an hour earlier on friday?
- dahart 8y ago
  I wouldn't generalize to the industry, this data point is specific to one studio I worked at. And most were working some overtime, just not quite as much as they thought. Only a minority were working 40 or less. Personally, I was working much more than 40. I thought I was working 75-80 hours, but it was closer to 60-65 at the time. It legitimately felt like 75 even though I know exactly what 80 hours a week feels like, even though I had worked those kinds of hours for long stretches before that. One of the issues is that during crunch when people start staying late, often they start coming in later as well, so the day slides. The studio would buy dinner at 7 for the employees staying late, so quite a few people would roll in around 10:30 and leave after dinner. They felt like they were working a lot of overtime because they were staying late, but not accounting for coming in a bit late.

quickthrower2 8y ago

I quit 3 jobs in the last 5 years and time tracking by management is high up on the reason list. I will now refuse to work for any organisation that does it. The code and design quality turns to shit in such places. Everyone is trying to keep to the beat of their allotted time. Here’s your shovel. Dig a tonne of soil. You have 2 hours. No one is thinking of hiring a JCB because well thinking about that takes time from your time tracked task. Places that don’t track time probably get better results although they can’t prove it with metrics. Compare it to parenting, why aren’t we timing nappy/diaper changes? Oh because it’s mostly instinctive. A bit like programming! Sure we need to make sure we are on track but this can be done at much a higher level. Story points used properly fill this goal. Where I work we use them but there is no punishment for not meeting the story points. Not even a frown of disappointment that when we added up some numbers from a random distribution, they didn’t add up to some arbitrary number. Story points are a useful indicator, but they are part of a vector of information. We didn’t meet the story points because we worked on some technical debt, because ... for example. So in conclusion don’t you dare track my time and pull me in a room because I didn’t dig that hole quick enough.

JamesLeonis 8y ago

The crux of the story is this sentence: "They’ve taken a tool that could give people more ownership over their own work and distorted it into a mechanism for managers to exert control over their team." This is true for every company, no matter the tool. This could equally apply to a Methodology, meetings, deliverables, timelines, or any other top-down approach designed around coercion. I'm reminded on Tom DeMarco's thoughts about Control and what kind of projects need such controls [1]: To understand control’s real role, you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects: - Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million. - Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million. What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value. Can I really be saying that it’s OK to run projects without control or with relatively little control? Almost. I’m suggesting that first we need to select projects where precise control won’t matter so much. Then we need to reduce our expectations for exactly how much we’re going to be able to control them, no matter how assiduously we apply ourselves to control. [1]: https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep...

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Caveat though: in a competitive market, all projects will tend to move towards margins of Project A (or worse). When all low-hanging fruits are long gone, and bosses are still trying to optimize some more, tightening control to eliminate variance starts to make sense... for the company. It seems to me that human values like happiness and respect can only exist where a market isn't efficient yet. It certainly seems so if you look at worker treatment vs. margins/competitiveness.
- jakecopp 8y ago
  Isn't the point of unions/minimum wages designed to artificially lift the floor (or lower ceiling of efficiency) of an efficient market to keep human values of happiness and respect decent? I suppose then you're still left with competitiveness between countries.

kardianos 8y ago

I'm a programmer. I also sometimes manage others. Time tracking and continuous code code review is an important way to spot workers who can't stay on task or are way over their head. If you can catch issues early, you can help them and the team succeed. If you lack time tracking and continuous code review many developers will "fall through the cracks" and it will take much longer to discover they are a net negative to the team. Even if it becomes apparent, it becomes much easier to point to sometime somewhat objective then gut feelings. Time tracking is good for accountability. Time tracking should be simple. Time tracking should only loosely be associated with tasks. * Email 0:45 * Meet with customer 1:00 * Program Complete solution and deploy it (TASK045) 0:05 I would be very wary of developers who refuse to accurately track their time.

wolco 8y ago
Tracking at the microlevel is horrible. The time wasted keeping up and the padding in explainable areas to offset the undocumented task like pick up phone, talk to coworker, get water, go to bathroom, answer question. In your example email took 15 minutes in reality it took 1 minute and I've used 14 minutes to get a coffee speak to an employee about upcoming company bake sale, holding the door for the CEO and getting to the conference room 5 minutes early to meet the client.

keithnz 8y ago

I'd be really interested to know ( I was going to do a Ask HN ) on who has to track their time at work, how big the company is you work for, what detail do you track to and whether you think it's useful and if so, how is it useful?. I personally work in a semi small product based company and we don't track time, but we have a few "point in time goals" where we need to get a solution sorted by a specific date. I started with extreme programming in 2000 and used to use the planning ideas and velocity indicators, which is okish, but kind of a blunt tool. However the real mechanism to deal with problems is scope management. So now I just work on the idea of continuous focusing on goals and scope management of those goals. This works pretty well in a small team and time frames that are not too long (2 - 3 months). However a lot of our development is purely feature based, which is often not time critical, but are scope managed to what I'd call "worthwhile" increments So instead of worrying about time, my emphasis is goals/focus, feedback on progress and scope management. This tends to lead to good time outcomes.

welder 8y ago

> Click to start. Click to stop. That's the problem right on their website[1]. Developers shouldn't have to waste time manually time tracking, it's been automated already[2]. Unless your programmers' time isn't worth much, you're better off not manually time tracking at all. Due to context switching, manual time tracking actually hurts overall productivity. I've heard people say they get in the habit of manually time tracking and don't think about it anymore, but that's just getting into the habit of getting distracted from the real work: shipping changes. [1]: https://www.7pace.com/timetracker https://www.7pace.com/timetracker [2]: Many tools already exist for automatic time tracking.

smichael 8y ago

I keep a hledger timedot file[1] open in a hot-key drop-down iTerm window. Each 15-minute chunk is logged with a dot. I group dots into hours for quick visual scanning. 2019-01-08 fos.hledger.sup . adm.email .. adm.finance .... .... .. fos.plaintextaccounting . fos.hledger.issues.941 .... . has-res ... biz-res .. I've trained myself to update this often while at the computer, and before walking away. Delayed retroactive logging is also pretty easy. Working in quarter/half/whole hour chunks, and in rhythm with the clock, and having a pane showing recent sleep/wake/timelog-saved events, all help. Not every day is the same; this system has been quick and flexible enough to suit a range of conditions. I can set daily/weekly/monthly time budgets if I want. Some more details at [2]. [1] http://hledger.org/timedot.html http://hledger.org/timedot.html [2] http://hledger.org/Time-planning.html#simons-hledger-time-dashboard-201805 http://hledger.org/Time-planning.html#simons-hledger-time-da...

chrisbennet 8y ago

I just went through this with a client. They have something called Team Work which is fine for tracking hours. What wasn’t good is they wanted all time accounted for and they wouldn’t let you add new tasks, management had to add them. So if you wanted to fill out the task honestly (“changed font”), you would need to get the PM to add the new task. So to record 20 minutes of “new task” would require at least another 20 minutes to find the PM for that project and have him add it. I eventually solved the problem by telling them I would finish the current project but “this isn’t working for me”. Poof, no more time tracking requirement.

triviatise 8y ago

we are experimentng with timeular https://timeular.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryNJfX4e6DaIGgOwF1vlpbkEzLcPsXz48jmJcKk17MyWr__I3feUvRoCoBoQAvD_BwE https://timeular.com/?gclid=CjwKCAiA767jBRBqEiwAGdAOryNJfX4e... It is an 8 (or more) sided shape that you flip to change tasks. The jury is still out as the people who are testing it havent had time to set it up..

rurban 8y ago

But the best came at the end: "If you really want to demoralize your engineering team and galvanize their distrust for time tracking and management, then you can use their time sheet data against them. Call them into a meeting. Pour over their time entries line by line and pick apart how they spent their week." => Useless meetings are much worse than useless timetrackers.

krudnicki 8y ago

I created https://www.timecamp.com https://www.timecamp.com that can track processes, window titles and url (free). Those informations presented visually can help make better timesheets :)