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Comment by likelynew | Hacker News Reader

I can totally relate to the superficial points. In my work, I can cut my work to half if I do what I think is best and achieve the same end goals. A big proportion of my work goes to useless things, doing what anyone think is right, and I am instructed to try them all. And even worse, I have to report what I did everyday in nice readable way, due to which I sometimes build temporary things that I know I will have to rework completely later.

I complained about daily reporting and my senior said I can say I could not achieve anything in a day, but I have to report. I haven't done that any time. Can anyone here advise if it's fine for me to report that.

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In general I'd expect the backlash from an unsatisfactory daily report to be low, there's a lot of opportunity to coach you and it lets your supervisor coach you/steer you if you've developed an inconsistency. It's also an opportunity to get domain specific knowledge of pitfall you might experience integrating with an existing system.

I think that deliberately making a to-be-scrapped system just to generate some work-done for the report is a waste of your time and you'd be better just making the real progress you can within the day and then reporting on how it's going/what (if anything) is stopping you from making progress; in general I don't think that tasks which take more than a day are expected to be complete.

The report is really about making sure that you're not sitting there unable to make any progress for days/weeks/months at a time resulting in an unexpected failure to deliver at the other end.

HTH.

I would say that if you've done any work in a productive direction, you've achieved something that day and can feel ok reporting your work in progress. Not all tasks may be able to be finished in a day, but you can make incremental progress on anything, even if it's only to find out a particular approach is infeasible.

The report should show what you are working on, where you are spending your time, etc. It is about time spent more than achievements per se. It can alert your senior that you need training on a particular task that is taking too much time or that the task itself is too difficult.

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