Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiradikusuma | Hacker News Reader

At work, my staff (20ish developers) usually clock in/out sharp bcoz of attendance, but they take 2+ hours lunch break and ~1hr for prayer breaks (2x within work hour), which I don't mind. But what frustrates me is their work is slow and low quality (not everyone), and I do thought about "short term" tracking like this. Thoughts?

(I just joined, so I "inherited" this)

View on HN

Are you new to this specific company or the software industry in general? This post reads like the latter. People come barging out of school with a pathological focus on "efficiency", which less-charitably stated is just lighting yourself on fire to serve the company dollar.

Software engineering has a phenomenal burnout rate. By the time they're 30 almost everyone I know starts thinking about their exit. I honestly don't believe software engineers can consistently put in more than 4 hours of good work a day on corporate code without being ground down in the long term. The people who stick around tend to be those who sit in meetings all day rather than actually writing code.

All of this is to say that you should prioritize things people have in short supply (happiness, dignity) over things corporations have in spades (money, time). Don't be that person who starts keeping track of how others use their work hours.

You're largely just going to lose the people that are genuinely trying but just aren't as productive for whatever reason and give legitimacy to those who aren't as honest who will learn how to game the metrics to defend their jobs. The former can be mentored and made more efficient, even with 2 hour lunch and prayer breaks, while the latter will just dig themselves deeper and cost the company more and more. Meanwhile, your best people who can find another job anywhere will leave immediately because they don't have to deal with the changes.

I'm not a manager, but if I were I'd probably try to track their goals and projects foremost, and let them manage their time under those constraints.

Micromanaging will just piss people off, and cause them to look for work elsewhere. Challenge them and let your quality expectations be known.

If the work is slow and low quality, you should analyze the decision making processes behind how work is assigned. At my previous job (as a developer), tickets were assigned based on who was interested, rather than who would best complete it (i.e. the dev who recently built something similar). Also, I'd recommend figuring out a way for your developers to share codebase knowledge effectively. It's much more efficient to spend an hour pair-programming with someone than debugging an issue for 2 days.

Set expectations on the work, not over what periods in the day it's done.

Exactly this. More managers need to start tracking the Work and not the Time.

'2 hours lunch break and 1hr for prayer breaks' and the work is low quality.

You don't need to track those people, you need to replace them.

A 2 hours lunch break is the standard in France.

"You can't fire these people" is also the standard in France.

Also standard: a stagnant economy (~0.25% GDP growth on 0.18% population growth) and sky-high youth unemployment (20-25%).

You can definitely fire people in France. I don't know how you got the idea you can't.

Also quality of life is perhaps more important than these numbers. People don't care about the GDP growth, don't want to have artifical employment with terrible and badly paid jobs (looking at you Germany), and prefer to eat good food for 2 hours.

People don't care about the GDP growth

They most certainly do when thinking about about the social programs GDP funds.

People care when they can't be hired for a good job, they care when their paycheck is stuck at the same level forever, and they care whether their government services are any good. If GDP isn't going to pay for those things, what is? Debt? Plunder?

Maybe you can get away with being absent for 3 hours of the workday if you're competent - but according to the OP they are not.

Seems unfair to one's employer and one's colleagues.

I might agree with you if all you quoted was the low quality part. My experience in software is that it’s typical to only get ~4 good hours out of someone per day. That’s 2or3 1.5-2hr streches. So the 4 hours worth of breaks, just means it takes 8 hours to get those 4 hours in. I’ve worked with devs who can maybe squeeze in another period into an 8 hour day (and if you’re reading HN you are probably more likely to be one), but I don’t think that’s something you can force someone to do, and probably shouldn’t assume you can hire for.

As for the low quality output, I’ve seen teams improve significantly by implementing good biweekly retros (note that bad retros can make things worse). Fostering the right atmosphere can do wonders to bring out latent talent. Also things like tooling can really help. CI with linting, and a no-judgement ‘you broke the build you fix the build’ rule can also really help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com