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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 real

by 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
Back in school, I worked part-time for a group that used limited time tracking; you input when you worked and how many hours per project, but didn't have to match hours to tasks. The one minor flaw in this program was that it didn't let you pick your hours worked - it simply asked for a single start and end time each day. Working two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon was impossible to input. Blessedly, it was an internal tool rather than a way to track client billing; the standing instructions were to just choose some random block of hours corresponding to your total time worked, so that you could get to the project-hours fields that actually mattered. But internal usage also raised the question of why they were voluntarily keeping a tool slightly less effective than a century-old punchclock.

by stesch 8y ago

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

Back in school, I worked part-time for a group that used limited time tracking; you input when you worked and how many hours per project, but didn't have to match hours to tasks. The one minor flaw in this program was that it didn't let you pick your hours worked - it simply asked for a single start and end time each day. Working two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon was impossible to input. Blessedly, it was an internal tool rather than a way to track client billing; the standing instructions were to just choose some random block of hours corresponding to your total time worked, so that you could get to the project-hours fields that actually mattered. But internal usage also raised the question of why they were voluntarily keeping a tool slightly less effective than a century-old punchclock.