Bingo of Awful IT Processes
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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.
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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.
I’ll offer a different explanation: After checking for a few months they realized that all’s good and that the tracking isn’t needed anymore.
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I’ll offer a different explanation: After checking for a few months they realized that all’s good and that the tracking isn’t needed anymore.
So they got their feelings satisfied with only a major annoyance to everyone and about a month of work wasted among everyone.
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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.
I've a slight manageable case of ADHD and I tend to obsessively hyperfocus on tasks. It's a good relationship because I get a lot of shit done well, and enjoy my work.
If you start forcing me to plan out my day every day, down to 15 minute increments, my productivity drops by around 60%, because I stop concentrating on getting shit done, and start working to rule. Not because I'm vindictive, but because that's what you asked me to do.
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Oh c'mon guy, just work your magic
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If this were a 5x5, I'd have the free square in the middle be "aI-pOwErEd"
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For my team it's been "oh your out of work? Let's just pull in another card for you from the backlog"
And then they get pissy when the burn down chart looks like a camel, finishing at the same place we started.
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A BRAND NEW CAR (emoji)
Can't I at least have a sticker?
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Any extra points for hitting the "Finished the feature?" square three times for the same feature?
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No requirements = nothing done, all requirements met
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I've a slight manageable case of ADHD and I tend to obsessively hyperfocus on tasks. It's a good relationship because I get a lot of shit done well, and enjoy my work.
If you start forcing me to plan out my day every day, down to 15 minute increments, my productivity drops by around 60%, because I stop concentrating on getting shit done, and start working to rule. Not because I'm vindictive, but because that's what you asked me to do.
Is that what people mean by time tracker?
I meant just writing down what you did and how long you worked on it during that day.
I'm quite lucky, I just have to basically fill in "8h" every day on the same project and then I'm finished. But other people are forced to be very detailed and it sucks.
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That depends on your team composition. Decoupling story points and hours means that the points indicate the complexity of the task; each developer might take a different amount of time to deliver that depending on their ability and expertise in that part of the system. The points give you a simple metric to show how much complexity the team have left to deliver, and tasks get assigned to whoever is best placed to deliver them at the time.
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Story points are evil because they were intended to help teams set achievable goals but are almost never used as such. Once a manager catches wind of this practice, they will bastardize it into a pile of shit most high. Scrum doesn’t prescribe this practice so ditch it. Reject it and move to something only the team members will understand. If you move to relative animal sizes or some shit and you meet your goals, managers can fuck right off.
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If this were a 5x5, I'd have the free square in the middle be "aI-pOwErEd"
Weirdly, after a certain percentage of useless meetings (that should have been an email) it does become more productive to make the AI "do the job": not because it's actually efficient, but an AI is never interrupted for a pointless meeting for hours.
