I have never understood why the clock-punching is so a big problem. It doesn't take much time to track your time spent with typical softare, in my experience. And apparently being clock-puncher now makes you dumb as well?
I have personally also tracked time on my personal projects. While not sure if it does bring much value, it is not a huge investment time-wise.
So what the super productive guy learns after a while is that they just need to "work overtime" and delay presenting results to get ahead. If this attitude starts pervading your team the productivity might start tanking too.
Situationally. With programming there are loads of different tasks. For some tasks I think time can be quite a good metric. Still, metrics matter and I think having lousy metrics is better than not having metrics at all. Of course you have to realize what purpose the metric has in certain situation.
I fundamentally disagree. Metrics don't live in their own world. They affect the world around them and incentivize certain actions. Bad metrics can produce bad incentives. There are certainly many cases where simply not knowing something is better than knowing something that's only partially right. However, that requires a level of humility and acceptance of one's limitations that can be hard to defend to others looking for straight answers to all questions.
But generally I think my main point stands. We need to be humble enough to sometimes accept lack of control (i.e. not using certain metrics/processes) rather than deluding ourselves by through certain metrics that really aren't very good.
Never mind that the task spec changed 5 times in those 3 days.
Because: 1) you know what you are lacking 2) you won't take action on wrong information.
But if you're a manager giving out raises to your team, taking no action (i.e. giving no raises) might seem a worse choice than using the unreliable data - and there's no expectation reliable data will arrive if you wait.
Happy employees, at a certain level of knowledge work, have a degree of autonomy.
Unhappy employees who could otherwise be happy employees are a waste of potential and money.
Having a clock on/clock off and a 9-5 butts-in-seats management style and incentive structure reduces perceived autonomy.
I don't agree with using it as a slur, but I do think it's an awful way to work in a creative field. Some of my most productive work happens as a direct result of my taking breaks - a walk here, a cup of tea there. All the while I'm thinking about the problem at hand. Time tracking discourages this of lateral approach in favor of brute forcing your way to the answer.