Bingo of Awful IT Processes
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What’s wrong with a time tracker? If you’re billing a client, you need to know how much time you spent on them. If you’re tracking internal projects, then it’s still worth knowing where your time is spent and if it might be better spent elsewhere. If it’s work hours that are tracked, then that’s a solution for ‘Unregistered overtime.’
I imagine this is a problem mostly for people who do all of their time tracker recording at the end of the week or month or whatever billing period they have. This requires a lot more thinking and time, and thus becomes a problem, compared to just filling it in at the end of the day.
Just a guess though.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
My first helpdesk job had daily "standup" that often went for over an hour. We'd be sitting there getting chewed out by the owner about how we're not getting enough done, while we can hear the phones ringing and angry voicemails from clients stacking up in the background. One of the worst jobs I ever had.
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Story points = hours just makes sense though. Even if your team doesn't do it, then everyone will do it in their head anyway. Especially management. But everyone will have a different formula so you start arguing about how many story points something is. Just do it in the open.
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This is a dream job!
I mean, nightmares are dreams, too.
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Making a copy of a folder on the same drive is a "backup"
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My first helpdesk job had daily "standup" that often went for over an hour. We'd be sitting there getting chewed out by the owner about how we're not getting enough done, while we can hear the phones ringing and angry voicemails from clients stacking up in the background. One of the worst jobs I ever had.
some people really seem to think that shitting on the ones who actually do the job solves anything
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My project is doing 12 of those. Guess who has another job interview round next Friday?
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What’s wrong with a time tracker? If you’re billing a client, you need to know how much time you spent on them. If you’re tracking internal projects, then it’s still worth knowing where your time is spent and if it might be better spent elsewhere. If it’s work hours that are tracked, then that’s a solution for ‘Unregistered overtime.’
What’s wrong with a time tracker?
I've worked in once place where I was support (no projects, all work came from and was tracked in tickets). Since everyone had to use the time tracking system anyway, I had to enter 8 hours every day. I was salaried, so no OT or docked pay for time off; I entered the same 5x8 every week, regardless of what or when I worked that week. Pointless.
Another time, I was subcontracting and had to enter time for the same projects for both my employer and the company that hired us. My employer wanted time submitted twice a month, and the hiring company demanded weekly. Tedious.
Two of these three companies were irrationally anal about pre-filling the time sheets, even when the hours were well planned or functionally irrelevant.
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Worse than 1 hour standup and 4 hour planning:
1 hour daily standups and 30 minute planning meetings.
I've been on a team that consistently congratulated themselves on how fast and smooth planning is, when none of the stories would have acceptance criteria or real descriptions at the end of the meeting, and then we'd have to spend tons of extra time during daily standup actually figuring out wtf the work was
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if i fill every space, what do i win?
Weekday drinking as a hobby.
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if i fill every space, what do i win?
Another row and column to make an actual bingo card
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I'll take top right and bottom left please.
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More like Bing of Awful IT Practices!
I've added this comment effort to my time tracker in story points.
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Damn, I've encountered all of these, and my current job features most of them.
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some people really seem to think that shitting on the ones who actually do the job solves anything
wrote last edited by [email protected]That guy was an egomaniac with a pathological need to be the smartest person in the room. Which was unfortunate for him, because although a competent technician, he was awful at running a business. Also he decided at some point that he knew enough about his craft in a field where everything is constantly changing.
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What’s wrong with a time tracker? If you’re billing a client, you need to know how much time you spent on them. If you’re tracking internal projects, then it’s still worth knowing where your time is spent and if it might be better spent elsewhere. If it’s work hours that are tracked, then that’s a solution for ‘Unregistered overtime.’
When you work on the same thing for 8 hours a day for years and then suddenly management decides that they need "detailed time tracking."
They just gave you a new job without additional compensation. New responsibilities, no new title, no raise, etc.
Then—months later—they realize that everyone's spending at least half an hour, regularly to figure out how they're spending their time. Some bean counter adds up how much that costs in real money and then—out of nowhere—management decides they don't need detailed time tracking anymore.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
The point is that if story points=hours, you should just fucking use hours from the beginning.
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The point is that if story points=hours, you should just fucking use hours from the beginning.
Yes, that's what I meant as well
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In the "right" use case, story points should just represent relative effort.
The hours dont matter, its more about ranking how challenging a task is, in order to help the manager rank the priority of tasks.
You should have typically 2~3 metrics:
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Points, which represent relative effort of the task to the other tasks you are also ranking.
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Value, how much value does doing this task provide, how important is it
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Risk, how risky is it that this might break shit though if you make these changes (IE new features typically are low risk since they just add stuff, but if you have to modify old stuff now your risk goes up)
If you have a good integration testing system automated, Risk can be mostly removed since you can just rely on your testing framework to catch if something is gonna explode.
Then your manager can use a formula with these values to basically rank a priority order for every ticket you now scored, in order to assess what the next thing is that is best to focus on.
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What’s wrong with a time tracker? If you’re billing a client, you need to know how much time you spent on them. If you’re tracking internal projects, then it’s still worth knowing where your time is spent and if it might be better spent elsewhere. If it’s work hours that are tracked, then that’s a solution for ‘Unregistered overtime.’
Might solve overtime since you always record it, or do you? If you record the overtime you spend on internal projects it's gonna have a bad impact on your ratio of client work to internal work. What you spend 20% of your time on internal projects, your colleagues only spend 10% there - but I work 50h/week instead of 40, but no one looks on this.
Another problem is when your company doesn't have any work for you and you gonna figure out where to book the 8h of doing nothing but waiting for work that day.
Yeah working with timesheets sure is fun work.
