Having recently been forced to use one maybe I have a little bit of perspective. The problem I believe, is, fundamentally, the need for managers to justify the

Having recently been forced to use one maybe I have a little bit of perspective. The problem I believe, is, fundamentally, the need for managers to justify their existence. Whereas other roles in the organization - engineers, salespeople, secretaries - have clear reason for their existence and work they can point to (code written, products sold, paychecks processed) managers do not. The fact that nobody reads any of these timesheets and that project estimates based on hours are a complete nonsensical fiction are really beside the point. The point is that the very production of this work is taken as proof that the manager, too, is producing valuable work. In small startups timesheets are irrelevant because everyone has their heads down getting on with the job. Managers exist, but the company can't afford to have people who just "manage". They do other valuable roles - whether technical or sales or office admin. The sign of a company "growing up" is when you suddenly have all these new people you have to report to, with ill-defined titles like "Product Delivery Manager" - and the timesheets. OK, but why are timesheet programs so badly designed ? The hardest thing in software development is to design something that's ill-defined - in other words, if the purpose of the program is a bad one, it's really hard to build a good program to fulfill that purpose. Simple timekeeping software isn't hard but management have so many nonsensical requirements that the software increases in complexity and correspondingly decreases in usability.