Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many of you have to log hours?

12 pointsthrowawayqu21 comments

I am a programmer and in my job I need to log all my hours against tasks in Jira, and submit that did the 40h.

Sometimes I don't like it because something takes longer than it should then I get pulled up on it. Sometimes the reason is I had a bad day couldn't concentrate etc. But it isn't good to say that so I need to invent an excuse.

My last job was similar and I really dislike it because it can only be bad for the programmer. Especially given how hard it is to estimate stuff.

Btw this is product dev work not billed out to client work. Those jobs I purposely avoid.

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I had to do it with one client. My philosophy is one of automation and never doing something twice - the less hours the client needs per unit work done, the better - and the philosophy of some of their managers was the opposite, that you didn't get what you paid for unless people sweated for it. In other words, they incentivised their own workforce and consultants not to automate anything.

So I made a read-only log, shared it with them, and started writing down everything I was doing to make their products. It ended up being really interesting as I never really analysed my development process, all the false tracks you go down for a while before reverting, all the data format changes, type errors you meet, avoiding repetition, documentation, flashes of inspiration, or how waiting for a query to complete breaks your flow... and I think they got a better idea of what is involved in producing stuff (no, it's not "just updating a few graphs" if you went and changed all the definitions and they come from 7 distinct data sources).

A side effect is that they got precisely the hours they paid for.

With other clients, I routinely used to put in a weekend or late nights if things didn't quite work, or if I had an idea for an interesting product that could be helpful to them. With these guys, it was "this is probably going to take me 10 hours. Can you approve these hours?" and 2 weeks later they'd say "OK" and I'd get started only then. They were so hours-driven that when I passed them a new product I did do in my spare time, they refused to even have a meeting to look at it in fear of having to pay for more hours. Quite amazing.

The problem with automation is, that everybody wants to be the benefactor.

So people who can't automate feel cheated by people who can.

In my experience only incompetent managers ask you to account for your hours for anything other than hourly billed client work.

The best projects I've worked on had:

* A manager who was technically literate.

* The tasks were documented and specified clearly.

* The project plan was prepared by a knowledgeable planner and thus realistic.

* Our weekly progress meeting focused on addressing the delay causing stumbling blocks.

My days as an employee are over. As a consultant, I bill for the completion of specific deliverables. I simply decline business from potential clients who demand an hourly rate. I just can't be bothered doing time-sheets and justifying why something took more time than planned. Occasionally I do underestimate the amount of effort a deliverable requires. That's the cost of doing business on my terms.

> In my experience only incompetent managers ask you to account for your hours for anything other than hourly billed client work.

And the government. We recently started selling to the government, and now we have to report our tasks and hours. Every two weeks has to have at least 80 explainable hours.

I have recently got involved with a client building a reporting web app on top of legacy applications. I ended up telling them that there were too many uncertainties and we would need to do this on an hourly rate. Just about wrapped up but still not clear to me whether that was a better but it did protect me when I ran into messy error prone data in the source systems.

This would be the best place any of us had worked.

Considering the audience for HN has not only developers, etc. but also management/entrepreneurs, it would be handy for lists like this to be compiled from Ask HN comments so that they could reference it and try to be better managers.

Had to do it in one place - everyone hated it as far as I know. Small tasks / actions started getting pulled into "misc" task. I think I put some hours as "thinking". Having a desktop tracker where you can just put the task name without much thinking distraction and then start/stop it, was helpful.

What I learned from this experience: the data either was not used or nothing noticeable changed because of it, it made people angry, it wasn't even close to accurate. Now it's one of the questions I'd ask at the interview (red flags: task time tracking, no source control, no testing, no qa plan, too many managers per project, tech choices are political not from engineering, ...)

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) applies to time tracking as well. Couple of places I've worked, we would put inflated time against "meetings" to spite the management.

Log hours is not required on my day job but I heavily do this easily with org-mode. This just get things done at least for me. I would recommend this if you're using emacs. Org-mode has a feature of time clocking as demonstrated in this link [0] that you could handle everything even if you got interrupted. Org-mode is amazing that you could track everything. Generating a clocking report for review is easy as pressing two keystrokes on your keyboard[1].

If you're new to using emacs, just use it for everything, every day, every time and after 3 months you'll be comfortable with it and might be able to like org-mode.

There are lot of resources over the internet, stackoverflow, mailing list, blogs, etc. If you're keen to learning emacs then the most important thing is just use it, use it, use it, use it.

[0] - http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking

[1] - http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#TimeReportingAndTracking

If you like the job and want to stay there a while, I would suggest also keeping a tickler file of your accomplishments. Refactor a particularly nasty bit of code and everyone went "whew!", write that in your tickler file. The reason is, if they mention anything negative about your time in your next review, you have your tickler file of accomplishments as a way of demonstrating how effective and productive you really are. Sure, it's more work and nobody who matters likes to toot their own horn, but it is best to keep data on your accomplishments. It makes writing self evals easy. It makes writing your resume easy. And, it makes sticking up for yourself in reviews[0] easy.

Likely, however, they are not really going to say anything. Some managers are old school and simply feel collecting time on everything is the way it's done, but end up doing nothing with the data because they're lazy.

[0] On the subject of reviews. If you ever walk into a review and have no idea what is going to be on the review, your manager is doing everything wrong! Leave that job as soon as you possibly can. Period.

Honestly, just take off if its bothering you. Anybody who has options is going to leave situations like that.

I worked at a place where the management tried to implement something similar. All of the main engineers left within about 2 months. They missed their big deadlines and over the next 1.5-2 years the rest of them (including management) lost their jobs. The product was sent off-shore and kept of life support for the remaining SaaS contracts. It was really quite sad to see something cash flow positive sink right to the bottom over something like that.

This happened for a short while at an old workplace that had an extremely toxic environment, this didn't improve the environment. People were expected to clock in/out when they arrived as well as for lunch and breaks. Developers were salaried not hourly. I suggest leaving as fast as you can, asking to have tasks add up to 40h a week of work shows a fundamental misunderstanding of development by management.

This was the bane of my existence when working in a larger corporate environment for 3 years. We used some SAP product that was written in 1995 using all of the best enterprise methodologies. It was slow, dumb, had obtuse validation rules and required all types of duplicate entry. I hope to never implement such a thing in my own company.

Our accounting department recently asked us to track how much time we spent on internal company projects. Needless to say, an entire team was laid off after finding the amount of time going into said project wasn't cost effective.

I had to track hours in recent jobs. I have tried a lot of tools, but found that Hamster's Gnome3 extension was the least distracting, and actually helped to keep me on task.

I will only got better at predicting time, when log/report ing real-hours not expected-hours.

I also set a maximum time spent blocked on tasks, ideally a short period, and reported every time I go beyond that point. This way if I needed help, I could get it. If help is not provided, employers wont be surprised by work schedule.

We're a product company. We track time, but only so we can plan our sprints better. We do estimates as a group using planning poker, which has the added benefit of fleshing out (and limiting) scope.

Our minimum unit of trackable time is 30 minutes. This helps us recognize how expensive context switching is.

Most importantly, each member of the team is only allocated ~30 hours per week to allow for all the nonsense that has a tendency to pop up.

I tried to do this, in jira, when I first started at my last company, and was told not to.

It takes time to do programming work. Sometimes you need a good think. Sometimes meetings distract you. And even off hours, I'm often thinking about how to do stuff. A problem at work, I might set aside, have a good night, and wake up in the morning with a solution.

Anyway this sounds like poor management. I don't have a really great answer on that.

I run a software agency with 8 peeps, and we all log time using Toggl. We have a bot that then sync's with Jira tasks - and generally we find this pretty painless.

For the benifit of being able to do accurate estimation comparisons, retrospectives, hunt time vampires etc - I personally think it's worth it.

I find this interesting... I may not compare easily as a contractor but at every job for the last 6 years as a contractor I have logged sometimes two and in one occasion three timesheets every day.

it does not bother me, in fact sometimes it helps me realize I might be getting burnt, when i see the numbers go too far up, I see it as a barometer.

I have to log daily worked hours (eg 8am-6pm). Many people just copy and paste an entire week or month at a time and don't log every single hour, but I prefer to be more exact so that I have some documentation of overtime etc to keep an eye on or refer to.

I log all my time against tasks too. I hate it.

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