Ask HN: What are your thoughts on tracking time at work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your thoughts on tracking time at work?

3 pointsgraypegg12 comments

I’ve just started a new job and during the on-boarding I learning that management expects a 15min accuracy on logged time in JIRA tickets. This includes meetings so tracking 15min for stand up every morning in a big shared story is something everyone here does. I feel like I would be able to adapt to it if the interval was 1 day or similar. Having every quarter-hour be accountable to my manager seems somehow untrusting. I’ve mentioned it to a direct manager, and the reasoning is that 15min/day over the course of a year is a large cost, and tracking ops time vs product time is something they find valuable… and that makes sense to me, but I can’t seem to shake whatever red flags this is flying in my head.

Most places I’ve worked at have tracked points, which still relate to time in a way, but are large enough to account for bad estimates, by design. I feel like I’m going to flounder here in the transition to 15min increments.

Where’s the sweet spot in your opinion? Is there a way to do time tracking and/or estimates that doesn’t feel « untrusting »?

I'd quit. Not like rage quit, but I'd start looking for a new job. This demonstrates (best case) that the "business" side of the organization does not trust IT. Worst case, this shows your manager doesn't trust you.

Unfortunately, I think this is very common. I've quit two jobs over it. One of those jobs I was the manager over four developers and I fought it for over a year. I told my director it didn't make sense. I told my developers not to do it. But eventually the constant fighting over it made me quit.

Possibly, I’m in an odd spot since the time of year makes it difficult to line up another job, but I do think I’ll start looking around at least. If nothing changes in the new year I’ll jump.

Glad I’m not being picky here! There is something off-kilter from the rest of the industry

I don't think it is an emergency, but I do think this is a symptom of a toxic organization.

In the meantime, I would try hard not to focus on it too much. Do a rough breakout in your head on how much time for the day you spent on each ticket then allocate that to the 15min blocks. It's not like they can fact check you on it

I've done it for personal productivity tracking and I hate it because it throws me out of flow all the time. What I've learned was the days I got nothing done are the days that I tracked time.

I would recommend the Pomodoro system if you do so. The full thing, not just the 25+5 minute, but also the day by day planning.

You may find that your company just needs plausible numbers for accounting purposes to allocate back to different budgeted projects, or capital vs operating expense, and you can just fill in approximate numbers at the end of the week, or copy the same numbers from one day to the next, one week to the next, etc.

Do you actually have to log every 15 minutes during work or you can log the time at the end of the day that accounts for every 15 minutes? I used to have a script that basically just fill out timesheets.

The expected result I was told was every day, I should have 6hrs of total time logged, and each individual entry should end in 00, 15, 30 or 45.

How people track that seems to be up to them, I’m using a pomodoro timer app that let me change the time to 30min for now and just filling in the time sheet at the end of the day.

If I cared enough, I could automate that as well I think, but it appears I’d have to do that on my own time unless it’s during my currently ticking down 30min break I can track haha.

So in reality what does this look like?

15 min - standup

15 min - standup runover

15 min - open ide and find the bug I was working on

15 min - thinking about bug

15 min - looking at unit tests

15 min - refactoring code..

lol

Does your company bill clients based on time spent on projects?

No, we have no external clients that would need to be billed; we build our own product.

if you work for a defense contractor, it's every 6 minutes (tenths of an hour)

Wow! I can imagine at a government-size scale, 6min of time is actually quite expensive comparatively

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