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Comment by dreyfan | Hacker News Reader

If they're suddenly asking you to log your hours, they're looking for a reason to terminate/replace you.

To me it's bizarre that a contractor wasn't logging their hours in the first place, so it sounds more like fixing their earlier mistake rather than something malicious.

Meh. Most contracts are day rate, and effectively fixed-term salaries.

Most contracts where? Contractors I've hired were generally paid by the hour.

I'm based in The Netherlands.

London

Still, stay sharp.

Don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

A previous job made us track our hours so that we could "improve estimates," but mostly it only made people unhappy.

It’s important if your billing against a clients retainer or per an hourly contract. There’s also cases where some time might be able to count as part of the R&D tax credit.

We ask all of our employees and contractors to track time against tasks. Yes it can be a pain but it helps prevent people from spending way more time on a task than there was budget for.

Sometimes the client of the project you're working on just wants to know what they're paying for.

What? My company recently added it to help us measure % of time on bugs vs features, and by section of the code base. This is a very very big assumption to make.

You can do that with story points rather than hours

Not if you want it to be accurate.

In my experience, points are more accurate than hours, since most people work with high variability in productivity over time that can't be captured by a mechanism as crude as a stopwatch, so a corollary metric creates a more accurate number than an absolute metric.

We're also talking about measurement after the fact.

"How many points did you spend on that story last week?" is not something anyone is going to accurately answer (and it doesn't mean anything, anyway).

Yah exactly. A scrum master will also say never try to equate points to hours, its a losing game.

But being able to look back in May and say we logged 32% of all development hours on bugs is a very useful metric for me the business owner / dev lead.

(In addition we don't do story points on bugs. I am so far away from the by the book agile thing, I don't even know if this is correct or not anymore).

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

Time based software development estimates before the magical "story points" system was in vogue.

It’s also more useful when looking back IMO. Points are more meant to be a soft guess for going forward.

Story points are not a tool for duration, they are a tool for relative estimation and should never be converted to time in any capacity. _Especially_ not inter-team.

This is the current biggest mistake in the industry, imo.

I agree, but I'd say story points are themselves a mistake. In the end, what matters is time. Story points don't matter if the schedule slips. So you either get story points and no way to keep a schedule, or story points + time estimates (with useless story points), or just go with time estimates.

The schedule may still slip, since estimating time is very difficult, but at least some of the time it will be correct (or estimates will get padded until things happen on time). Either way, it's more useful than giving up on the problem.

The entire purpose of introducing story points is to move away from time estimating. Time estimating is broken and inaccurate. Complexity estimating is marginally more accurate but still with a wide range of inaccuracy.

Instead teams should focus on delivering value incrementally, then using metrics over those increments as a measure for future increments.

And yet there's still a product, still a date that product will ship to customers, and therefore time estimation is at some level necessary. Often there's a factory building something, physical shipping, late fees, etc. If you're solely responsible for setting all your own deadlines, then there's no need to estimate time. That's very rare.

Time estimating is broken and inaccurate. But that doesn't mean it's unnecessary, or that one can just give up on it. Teams should focus on delivering value incrementally, then using time taken as a metric (among others) over those increments as a measure for future increments.

Hence my point about using measurements from historic actuals to give a forecast instead of asking for explicit estimates. Sitting some devs down and asking them for gut feels is far less accurate than comparing to previous increments.

Certainly! "Gut feel" is a shit way to do time estimates. It's a programmer way, not an engineering way. Of course it's harder to get historical data for software than for other engineering fields, because software is so new. But it's not impossible, and if companies don't even collect the data (due to using story points) they'll never manage to get forecasts when they need them.

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