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Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

tostitos1979

Kudos to you. If all developers acted this way, we'd have a lot less abuse.

I doubt any sane developer would come up with the idea of a stopwatch plugin on programming tasks. But I know some PMs who would. It is scary how being well-spoken and technically oblivious leads people to success in our industry.

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No, asking people to log time is not abuse. Perhaps it's counter-productive (but even that's debatable as it depends on a lot of things). But it most definitely is not abuse.

Abuse is having the shit kicked out of you for answering back. Or being locked in a room for 48 hours without food or drink because you made a mistake. Or having your passport taken away and being forced to work for 18 hour days, 7 days per week, with no holiday and no pay.

All these things are happening in our world today, and equating them with programmers having to keep timesheets is ridiculous. It makes us sound like a bunch of spoiled babies who cry when we aren't allowed to play all day. So please use a different word than 'abuse' to describe something you prefer not to do at work.

Meh, if you want to go to the extremes there is no limit. I agree with what you said but it's completely out of context and I don't see how it is related to the topic.

In my eyes, it's relative to you or the situation in which you are in. For me personally it felt a lot like abuse and utter lack of trust to resolve using time sheets for a permanent position (not talking about freelancers and contractors).

Also why do you think that we are spoiled? I'm so fed up of people making software development look like a piece of cake and so easy. I tried to help some of my friends start with coding but after couple days they were quite overwhelmed and thought it was not so straightforward as imagined or as it looks to be. I'm also not talking about creating a hello world HTML document.

I'm definitely not a rock star programmer but I try to be solid one with hands-on mindset. I have 5 1/2 years experience working as a front end developer and there is still so much to learn and to improve on. Software development (especially web) is a field where you need to stay up to date and keen. We might not be exhausted physically but it's much harder to recharge and relax your mind.

This is why we shouldn't just put up with everything (timesheets is only one example of many) for the sake of having a job at all (because there are so many unemployed people right?). There are people who want to play safe and I'm fine with that but I learned that "no risk no fun" is true.

Update:

I want to add that I'm always grateful for what I have and don't take anything for granted. However I also know that I don't get anything for free unless you work hard for it.

I think his point is that just because an employer wants to log your time, and see how you're spending your time while at work, doesn't mean it's abuse. If they're paying you for your time, it's perfectly reasonable for them to see how you're spending your time.

Now, whether you choose to put up with it or leave, that's a different question. Given a choice, most people would choose an employer who gives them more latitude, as opposed to one who is monitoring them that closely. But that's an argument based on practicality, not morality.

Precisely. You're saying that having to do things you'd rather not do is 'abuse', when I'd just call that 'being a grown up'.

You know there were grown up programmers in the computer industry before we got the MBA-types involved as PMs. Frankly, I'll be very happy to keep track of minutes I spend coding if all PMs in the org had to take a basic programming competency test. Lets say something easy like inverting a linked-list (with pointers yo) or b-tree deletion. I think some PMs are "tech clueless" but have worked their way up because they are effective at bullying. This is not true of very PM but certainly some PMs.

1. Do you need to know how to invert a linked-list (with pointers "yo") to pass a basic programming competency test? No. No you don't.

2. Why point out that it is "easy"? Is it so you can feel superior to people who might not know this?

The overall point is that there isn't a 1:1 correlation between time and productivity in this industry as there is in, say, working a cash register.

I might spend a couple of hours trying to debug something screwy with my dev environment, or googling around and thinking about what the solution to a problem, that doesn't create more tech debt, should look like. I might spend time dealing with feedback in code review, some of which may be beyond the scope of the story or not immediately perceptible by a stakeholder, but it's work that needs to be done nonetheless. Project managers are not developers for the most part, so they have to trust me on that.

When you hire someone to do tasks that you could do yourself, then asking them to log time is reasonable since you know what needs to be done and what the timeframe should look like. Asking a highly skilled employee such as a software developer to log time is an insult to their judgment and a waste of their (and your) time. You can't gauge my productivity from a time log.

This quibbling over the term 'abuse', like we should all just be thankful we're not sex slaves or PHP devs and leave it at that, is completely irrelevant. Fine, it's not abuse. It's just antagonistically treating your employees like untrustworthy delinquents. Is that better?

The fact that there are others who have it much worse than you does not invalidate your grievances or limit the language you can use to speak to those grievances. If we start that kind of comparison, then I'd argue the people you describe have it pretty good, compared to people to Nazi concentration camps, who got shot dead (!) for giving their supervisor sound technical advice (assuming Schindler's List is an acceptable source of Nazi anecdotes).

The OP is talking about 'workplace abuse' which has a specific definition which, even in its less extreme forms, is much worse than being asked to keep timesheets.

Imo you are missing the bigger picture here by clinging on the meaning of the word "abuse" and the timesheet example. However, if you are happy keeping timesheets knock yourself out. For me this is a big issue and if you think it's okay then what's next? Video surveillance at your desk or maybe counting number of commits in git per day?

It is precisely the word that I object to. You can express like and dislike, and choose and reject employment based on those likes and dislikes, all you want.

But bandying around words like 'abuse' based on those likes and dislikes is akin to crying wolf when you see a pussy cat. It devalues its meaning for those cases where people are genuinely suffering and need help.

There's certainly something to be gleamed here about programmers and their reluctance to context switch, and the desire for a one unified standard.

However, English isn't a programming language.

A more light-hearted comment on what I'm saying would be Eddie Izzard discussing the word 'awesome':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rYT0YvQ3hs

By devaluing the word, when we hear people talking about 'abuse' we will assume they're just whinging.

> It makes us sound like a bunch of spoiled babies who cry when we aren't allowed to play all day

so if it isn't third-world violence, then the word 'abuse' in inappropriate?

There are legal definitions in the EU and US (and probably most countries) for what counts as 'workplace abuse'. Being asked to fill out timesheets as a general company policy doesn't satisfy any of them, so in that case the word 'abuse' is inappropriate.

It's worth pointing out that a lot real and extremely serious abuse is not limited to third-world countries. For example, the USA has an estimated 60,000 slaves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Slavery_Index#Controver...

Implicit to "legal definitions" is that those definition are used when legal action is taken, ie. when the abuse has reached a certain, actionable level at which the authorities need to step in.

This HN discussion is not framed in a legal context, so not satisfying a legal definition of "workplace abuse" doesn't mean the word is being used inappropriately.

OPINION: If your definition of a "grown up" is to let people ruin your work process then meh, that's your choice. Don't try to impose it on others. Keep your disliking of what terms people use for your local beer pub and not on HN. Deal?

ON TOPIC: I'd definitely call a timesheet "a workspace abuse", yes. Most of the programming is a very creative work. Do you pester a designer for a complex image for a PR campaign? Do you go to him/her on the top of every hour and ask "what's up, you done yet"? Do you check a building's architect monitor every hour?

I am currently having a subtle and a very hard-to-detect bug in an e-commerce shop I am maintaining. It leads to losing a few orders each day (out of 100+). The people I work for are wise enough to understand that pinpointing the cause of the bug is 90% of the work and yes, it may take days -- days during which I add more defensive coding on several places, increase logging statements, introduce several new integration tests, and what not.

If I was forced to use a timesheet in this situation I'd honestly wouldn't even know what to say in it on the top of every hour. I would strongly resemble the private detectives in those noir animations I guess. "Currently chasing clue X" -- "No wait, that's not it. Damn it, I am out of cigarettes. I must persevere!" -- "The owner of the bar knew nothing. Damn. Moving on."

Would you want that in timesheets if you were the manager? How would it help you?

Well, maybe I'm insane, but I would.

One of the biggest problems with estimation (a frequent HN topic) is not knowing how long it took to do something. If you don't know how long it typically takes you to do a task, how the hell can you estimate how long it will take to do a variation of that task?

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