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Yeah this idea of tracking time is blue collar thinking. Are CEOs doing this? Usually at companies where they are logging everyone’s time and scrutinising it, t

Yeah this idea of tracking time is blue collar thinking. Are CEOs doing this? Usually at companies where they are logging everyone’s time and scrutinising it, the CEO, exec team and perhaps managers are exempt from needing to log their time. But as programmers (and related creative jobs like BA, UX, Graphics, Architect etc) I think it is also folly to track time to the minute. As long as you can track what has been delivered by the team over the last X weeks in production, you’ve got a fair idea if they are worth the money. Whether I took 2 or 4 hours to fix a bug, well if you trust me not to have popped to the beach and claimed it took 4 there is no business for a company to track it, and there is no need for me to personally track it either. Instead you want yourself to be passionate about becoming great at your craft as a pragmatist. A good balance about knowing the ide way to do things, the quick and the slow way and how to choose wisely. These are the sorts of people you want to employ. A personal standard is I won’t take a job where they track my time. And I don’t track my own time for work or side projects.

muzani 8y ago
Plenty of CEOs schedule meetings. That's pretty much the same thing. Tracking time is just allocating some time off to do a thing. But it's entirely different reasoning. Their job is more to make decisions as it comes or at least to link together people who can solve a problem or make a decision, and track it for their own uses. Most of the things managers do don't apply to people who do the work, e.g. waking up at 4 AM, working long hours. Scheduling interrupts flow, and is thus very bad for creative workers. But tracking time isn't so bad. I track all my work, partly to estimate things like how long a page takes to set up, or how long it takes to build a dashboard.

muzani 8y ago

Plenty of CEOs schedule meetings. That's pretty much the same thing. Tracking time is just allocating some time off to do a thing. But it's entirely different reasoning. Their job is more to make decisions as it comes or at least to link together people who can solve a problem or make a decision, and track it for their own uses. Most of the things managers do don't apply to people who do the work, e.g. waking up at 4 AM, working long hours. Scheduling interrupts flow, and is thus very bad for creative workers. But tracking time isn't so bad. I track all my work, partly to estimate things like how long a page takes to set up, or how long it takes to build a dashboard.