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Fuck detailed work logging. Best I can do is tell you how much time I spent per client in increments of 30mins.
Had a coworker do it in 2 hours increment, customer asked to have him removed from the project because even emails led to being billed for 2 hours.
Context switching tax
Yep, absolutely hate that. It’s this insane belief that there’s no tasks to complete in a project which aren’t tracked on a board somewhere.
And you’re always left with this dilemma of whether they just want to be left with this belief and they’re not going to ask why certain tasks took longer.
Or if they really want you to work as slowly as possible, spending 5 minutes each to document and track tasks which are done in 15 minutes.Or if they’re even more insane and expect you to just not do those tasks.
I’ve always been amazed when i get a new “seasoned” project manager and they try to really work on making all the tracking as efficient as possible so they have tons of metrics.
…and then nothing happens. We don’t look at projects and tasks and figure out which work would be best for which team members based on past experience. We don’t do any sort of optimization. We just track “velocity” and our estimates on release end up more dependent on how new the tech or the concept is (not knowing what we don’t know) than anything else.
My company is very lenient with how I spend my time (as long as I’m somewhat in the office and get my work done, which I god danm do!) and it’s absolutely amazing. Often before a big release I run out of work and since no one is tracking it, I can just work on optimizing/cleaning our code or fixing some UX issue. I mean what are people gonna complain about? Me not doing the work I already completed? If they ever start tracking us I’m jumping ship, our new team pushes out the best code this company ever had and if that’s not enough, then nothing could be.
I’m also confused about this whole “constant meetings” thing. At work I have an analyst that does the vast majority of client communication for me. From how people talk about work, it makes me think “analysts” aren’t a thing in other companies. My gf (also a developer) didn’t even know what an “analyst” could be. Like seriously? I love that guy! Life would suck soo much without him. The only meetings I attend are technical or educational in nature. And our monthly team leader meetings, just because he wants to make sure everything is ok with us.
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Ask for per-task time tracking
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Get angry when you use round numbers in your time estimates, because “How could every task possibly take increments of five minutes?!”
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Get angry when you use arbitrary non-rounded time entries, because “How am I supposed to determine the average time it takes you to complete a task when there’s so much variance?!”
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Gets angry when you spend an hour every day filling out your fucking time cards, because “You’re not supposed to bill for that!”
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Gleefully accepts absolute garbage work that you just subcontracted to Fivr.
I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall “why are you billing half an hour a day to admin”
“Um” says I “working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we’re tracking our work under takes at least that long”
Then management shot themselves in the foot
Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.
Step 2. Assign a “tiny” piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.
Step 3. Don’t assign any other work to the team
Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later
So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.
Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount
I don’t think it’s fraud since it’s billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I’m glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing
I used to work at a place that required daily progress reports on tasks (this was before agile took off so ‘daily standup’ wasn’t a thing.). So I wrote a script to schedule my git commits throughout the week (so that I had at least one a day), and every afternoon it would pull my git history, generate a summary, and email it to my manager.
He knew it was automated and hated me for it but I had the most consistent and detailed reports. On the upside, it really trained me to make good commit messages. On the downside It really instilled me with a strong “burn the building down” kind of vibe that persists to this day.
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I actually liked time tracking. It’s when reality went out the window and my imagination took over.
They have badge attachments now that beep and tell your supervisor if they don’t sense a nurse washing their hands or using hand sanitizer when they enter a room. I get the idea for how this could lower infection rates in hospitals but I wonder if maybe it’s not just more humane to just hire more nurses and encourage us to take time to do things correctly instead of essentially fitting us with a shock collar that does everything but the actual shock. They’re doing shit like this and people still ask why they have to put up nets to catch people jumping off the parking garage like it’s some kind of mystery.
Ok, so I get the “good intentions” of the procedures - sanitary, patient health and wellbeing, etc - sounds good on paper. It yeah, you’re right that it’s demoralizing and easily causes burnout. I’ve had jobs where management absolutely didn’t trust their employees to do the right thing. They even went so far as to herd us into a janitors closet and then walk us to our desks (floating desk arrangements at a call center) like we were children.
The managers were told to walk up and down the rows and look for people not doing their job and fire them. We were told if we weren’t on active calls, we were to sit in our chairs with our hands over the keyboard in ready position for the next call. No talking; no reading books; no nothing. I’m sure somewhere on paper it sounded like a good idea. But it was the absolute most toxic environment I’ve personally been in.
Anyway, y’all should unionize.
Fucking tech solutions to a manager problem. The manager should care about the metrics of wait time and client satisfaction.
If waits are low and satisfaction is high. Then who gives fuck all about what techs do in between calls.
Metrics like calls per tech or average length of calls could be used to better understand tech efficiency. Or even rings before pickup. A good pbx can help ensure calls are relatively equally spread between techs. This helps keep one tech from over working for another slacking off. You can have utilization goals so that you aren’t under or over staffed (I’m of the opinion that a techs utilization should be roughly 75-80% and they should have downtime in their shifts to prevent burnout.)
It’s stupid, inhumane, and impossible to expect an employee to track, bill, and work 100% of their shift.
Right now we’re just trying to keep the ANA from making it our fault for “patient abandonment” if the hospital doesn’t hire (usually extremely expensive) travel nurses to cover strikes. The way strikes work for nurses is that hospitals are essential to a community, so you have to give notice, then the hospital has to find temps to cover (again, I’m fine with this, I don’t consider them scabs, their wages alone are punishing the hospital, but this is also why they shouldn’t be capping travel salaries). The issue is they’re trying to make it so that it’s the responsibility of the nurses going on strike to find that coverage, or they get charged with abandoning the patients. They’re taking comments right now, let me find the link. Here’s the r/nursing post that person said it all better (I’ve been trying to get more hcw communities going over here but it’s slow going and feels like it’s only me sometimes.
I bet scam call center have a better working environment that this.
Stuff like this is the expansion of the state the Lenin railed so strongly against.
Why not just have the beeper let the nurse know? Do you think the nurses aren’t washing their hands intentionally? Only report it if they’re like, constantly not doing it! The goal here is surveillance and punishment not improved sanitation
As a healthcare worker, the nurses are absolutely not washing their hands intentionally. You’d be surprised how many healthcare workers don’t believe in science based medicine.
just hire more nurses
Look, I get your point, but it’s not like nurses grow on trees. (Especially good nurses.)
Things need fixing, but they need fixing far earlier than that.
Actually it is. There’s not actually a nursing shortage if you look into the numbers, there’s just a shortage of nurses willing to get screamed at by delirious people while doing backbreaking work without backup or enough people to distribute that work among while getting paid pennies. If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around. It always comes down to pay and ratios (which are inextricably intertwined) and everything else is fractions of percentages of the problem that get overemphasized so that the people siphoning money out of this system never have to address the elephant in the room. Don’t let them deflect you away from focusing on their greed. A bunch of nurses are also out there pushing themselves through degree mill nurse-practitioner schools to become wildly unsafe prescribers for the same reasons as those leaving entirely, which also reduces the bedside workforce.
If so many people weren’t leaving the field entirely due this issue (the chief complaint ALWAYS being under-staffing / low nurse-to-patient ratios, THEN pay), there would be plenty of nurses to go around
I think both can be true.
From expenses point of view, Isn’t under-staffing almost the same thing as low pay? What’s preventing hospital administrators from hiring more nurses? If it’s just money, then I don’t think the complaint of under-staffing all that different from the complaint of low pay; I suspect it’s even affected by sort of preference (some nurses would prefer working more for better pay, others would prefer sharing the workload.)
Of course from administration / governance point of view it boils down to money, what I’m saying is that I find it unlikely is that it’s “just hire more nurses”. It’s also doctors, other staff, etc. It’s more likely the whole system.
