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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

I have someone like this on my team. The guy is a really good engineer and consultant, he is unorganized as hell and takes forever to log his billable time in the system. This causes billing problems regularly, requiring multiple hours of manual correction by myself (his manager) and has also resulted in clients receiving inaccurate invoices.

I haven't been able to figure out how to handle it. I really don't want to have to micromanage him, because I feel like that would cut into his confidence. But he's also pretty terrible when it comes to an important aspect of the job.

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This one feels like the article actually addresses it perfectly. I have had an issue with this literal problem. I had a 'consultant' we would farm out to other organizations. She was phenomenal with work quality, but her organization was garbage, and her billing was always late/inaccurate.

Here's what I did (and what the article seems to agree with):

1. Be clear about your expectations. Have standardized forms, and clear deadlines the two of you discuss. Also discuss and agree to consequences for not meeting expectations for timeline and accuracy. You WILL have to explain why this is important; to most of these folks who are rockstars, the work is important, not the follow-up.

2. Work through the documentation process, and find the pinch points. How can you help with that (provide resources).

3. If you have set consequences, follow through on them, or change the process to suit the person if they are valuable enough.

In my experience, being bad at ancillary things isn't malicious. It's either not a priority, or it has never been called out. Super high performers won't understand why it matters (especially in the tech sector where 'the work' is all that matters). It's up to you to translate why it's important, and what the impact is for the team. Be open to solutions you hadn't though of.

Good luck.

This is so true for many things in life, including relationships and parenting :)

I found that the things that worked for me as a parent also worked for me as a manager: treat them as adults, ask questions rather than assume/provide answers, include them in finding solutions to problem rather than dictate, and so on.

He understands why it matters because he used to run his own one-man show before we "acqui-hired" him. But whenever I notice that he doesn't have his time logged in the system, he says "yeah I've been slammed all day" or something similar and promises to get it done soon... and then doesn't. And he genuinely is getting a lot of work done so there's no foul play or anything.

The issue isn't just logging his time either - he's also not great at taking detailed notes, writing accurate scope of work documents, etc. He's very good with clients, has a lot of knowledge and experience with the tech stack, but is a "cowboy engineer" if that makes sense.

The way I'm thinking about this is that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, but for this one person, said weaknesses are directly affecting the company bottom line so they are impossible to ignore. :)

Yep. Set expectations and ensure he gets it (he might not, even if he ran his own shop), work through that process, then get rid of him if you have to.

That sucks out loud, but sometimes weaknesses outweigh benefits. And it's your job to draw that line.

Everyone looks to software solutions, but maybe this person needs an assistant of some sort.

It also depends on how complicated the current software is. If it is simple, then yeah, you probably need to delegate the paperwork to someone else. But maybe the software is needlessly complicated, annoys everyone, but others can deal with it and this specific employee just has a lower frustration tolerance. In that case, making the software easier would make everyone happy. If everyone uses the software every day, and you can reduce the time from 2 minutes to 20 seconds...

I am also the kind of person who forgets to write daily logs. But if I set up the web page to open automatically at 4 PM on my computer, then I don't forget, of course. However, in some systems you only need to automatically open some URL, while in other systems it is more like "open the URL, click this link, authenticate, click that link, authenticate again, click another link, and now you finally get to edit the spreadsheet".

How much work it is to edit the time fields? Are reasonable default values provided (either your standard work time, or a copy from yesterday), so that on a typical day you only write "did this and that" and click OK? Or do you need to specify the time using a complicated wizard that sometimes gets it wrong, e.g. you make 10 mouse clicks to choose "9:00" and 10 more mouse clicks to choose "17:00", and then you sometimes get an error message saying "you cannot log 32 hours during one day", so you need to erase the whole record and start again? Do you work for a foreign company that speaks a language you don't understand, but you were told it's okay because the company policy is English everywhere... well, except for their time-logging system, which requires you to always choose from several pull-down menus filled with gibberish?

How detailed are the logs? Is it enough to give "implemented Jira story 1234" as a description for entire 8 hours of work, or do you need to provide a detailed list of steps, with a time interval for each? Do you need to fill out two separate time logs, one internal for your company, and one external for the client?

None of these examples was made up (they are collected from multiple companies though). So, it makes sense to also check whether the software side is sane, and optionally fix it -- maybe give the task to the employee who had problems writing the logs, he will be sufficiently motivated. But sometimes this doesn't help, or for some reason you are not allowed to fix the software... and then it makes sense to hire an assistant.

Not that anyone here is qualified to make anything close to a diagnosis on 3 lines of text but, this behavior sounds a little like either stress / anxiety or perhaps ADHD.

Agree to do thing, get distracted by far more engaging thing, don't do agreed upon thing.

Would it be possible to have an entry-level admin assistant enter and track everyone's hours? Would that free up the engineers to be engineers?

If he's productive, then you have a lot of other possible solutions besides just getting him to do more paperwork. Hire a team secretary, or junior engineers to shadow the seniors, or just be the amanuensis yourself.

I’ve run into this previously. Someone else mentioned this, but an assistant at a much lower hourly rate would likely be of value. I would try to do a cost/benefit analysis, maybe starting with the following questions:

- What is this individual’s billable rate? - Is the administrative work something that could be done by someone at an hourly rate significantly less than the billable employee? - Would freeing up the billable employees time from administrative work allow them to work more billable hours? - What would the expected loss in billable work completed be if the employee was terminated or left? - Etc.

I’ve done these calculations before, and while as a manager it is a bit irritating to have an employee not do parts of their job, there may be a business case for accommodating it.

It seems like this would be a classic case where hiring an administrative assistant or an intern to handle this scutwork would be the best solution.

I find that people rarely think about how much money they are spending having highly-paid people push internal paperwork around...

I could be projecting, but it sounds like your team member has ADHD.

My work set up an automated system that emails people between 9-10am if they forgot to log their time the day before. You get dinged if and only if it gets to the second reminder at 11. As someone with ADHD I only distinguish two times: now and not now. Having a reminder that means "do it now" took me overnight from terrible timesheet compliance to near perfect.

It's not an automated reminder that happens every day at that time like an alarm clock. That would get tuned out / filtered out very quickly. The key is it's a novel message that I only see if I screwed up by forgetting the day before.

And it's easy to forget because the ADHD brain is like a CPU with only one register, and the register spill circuit for service interrupt / return from interrupt is faulty. In order to impersonate a functioning human being I tie certain things I need to do each day (like filling out my timesheet) to certain other events during the day. But if the routine gets broken or I get interrupted in the midst of doing the thing - the mind state that held what I was supposed to be doing is just gone.

It’s also important to mention ADHD is considered a disability in the US.

Having been on the receiving end of this, my manager and I sat down to work on the problem together. “More diligence” is not a good solution to recurring problems especially one as fundamental as organization. (Especially mine, as I have a disability in this area.)

There are various solutions to for organization. One I’ve used is taking the beginning of each day to write down what I did the day before. (End of the day failed horribly.) It gets me thoughts in order so I deal with high friction tasks like paperwork.

The issue could also be the perceived difficulty of software used to log hours. My brain hates using ticketing software because it’s a hassle to get everything entered properly. Most software systems I’ve used fight the way my brain works. It forces me to categorize things before I’m ready to categorize them. As a result, those tasks make me anxious, which means I tend to avoid them. If I “just do it”, it takes all of my energy for the day.

This is why I have a system for getting the organization done outside the system before tackling a poor UI.

When I worked as a consultant tracking billable hours was the hardest part of my job, far harder than any engineering problem, and the thing I hated even more than bad clients who couldn't make up their minds about requirements. For the last year I just started making up the hours and nobody seemed to notice! Thankfully I moved on to a salaried position at a product company and I don't have to micromanage myself anymore. I don't have a point here: time tracking sucks, that's all

I agree tremendously, same experience. It’s depressing that it’s 2020 and what seems like a trivial problem is still fundamentally unresolved. It’s the sort of thing Siri or Assistant should be designed for, but are not.

As someone with a similar personality, I doubt the employee has any delusions about their organization abilities.

They probably just don't like that aspect of their job and don't think it is that important.

Approach it by saying I know you don't like doing it, but it is important to do. Mention the consequences of not doing it and how you spent hours fixing them.

You might need to micromanage that one part of the job. Sometimes people need reminders on what to do.

Also mention that they a strong engineer otherwise and this is just one thing they need to work on. Don't expect them to be super organized, but they need to do the minimum when it comes to logging time.

If he's that good of an engineer, have you considered hiring someone to sit down with him every so often to help him log the data?

totally agree with this comment, help the person; we all bring different skills. Also, the person might just need a prompt or remind, someone telling them mid afternoon on Friday that a form is due before going home.

Have a very similar problem in our organization, and our project manager stepped in to be that helpful friendly reminder for high performing engineers that often fail at the organizational side of things.

Works out well, but you do need a person to play the role that could be called “babysitter” if you were a pessimistic person, and it takes a friendly work relationship and self recognition of (perfectly normal and common) deficiencies in organizational skills by the engineer.

In our org, everyone is friendly and respects each other for the most part so these things are taken positively rather than negatively.

> it takes a friendly work relationship and self recognition of (perfectly normal and common) deficiencies in organizational skills by the engineer.

Yes, if done poorly it can be shaming. Ultimately it comes down to "yes you suck at organization. However you are so good at X that the company will make more money doing it this way than by firing you; that's a win-win."

Specialization isn't just for insects

That also means you have a overly complex and crufty time recording system

Don't be afraid of feedback, and don't be afraid to criticize. Just ask for a certain time to do feedback, prepare a list of things to talk about, and then in a private space candidly talk about them.

It's one of the things that the Air Force expects its leaders to do, and I've always liked that. I've found people to generally be surprisingly willing to discuss topics on both sides of a feedback session.

Usual things to talk about would be expectations of what they'll do at work and all the related tasks, their work performance & what's helping and hindering it, how they fit in to their work-center both professionally and emotionally (do they feel detached, are they getting along with folks?), if there are recommendations from them for the work-center and how to improve the system.

Depending, it can take 20 min or go on for hours. I've found feedback sessions like these to be very useful and productive though, and less awkward than some people assume.

Can you get him a scribe? I've done projects over the years where I'm the "expert", and on those projects there are a lot of organizational details (like tracking billable hours) where I have brought in or asked for a project manager to be brought in, not to "manage" me or the project per se, but to take care of details like that so that I can focus on the work itself instead. Has worked well for me.

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