Ask HN: Do you register your hours at work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you register your hours at work?

I have been self-employed for 10 years but I have just accepted a full-time position as engineering problem solver at a product and project company.

I have a very hard time with the project mentality- build it fast, ship it, next one. Bit that's a different story.

I have been asked to register my hours down to internal meetings, on a daily basis.

I kind of want to know if my new managers also register their time.

It's time consuming and it takes a toll on the trustworthiness of how I spent my time.

I hoped it wouldn't come to this so fast.

Do you register your hours and how do you approach it ? Thx

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I have to fill in a time sheet at work.

This is because in the UK companies can claim tax back if they spent it on R&D. (Software engineering salaries are subsidised in the UK, yes.) The timesheets are to support that.

My employer only cares that I log the correct number of hours worked against each code. They don’t care that I log them in the right order.

I usually fill in my timesheet once a day, based on which meetings I attended, and which tickets I’ve been working on.

Similar think in NL.

Every quarter our boss would apologise and ask us to fill out timesheets (to the best of our knowledge).

Something like 20% of a FTE position could be "R&D" and this is what they claimed back.

I've had to do it, and always loathed it.

In my current job it's also a thing, and I try to be honest. That also means writing the hours I need to write hours (and other stuff, like checking the intranet for news).

In a previous job I had the situation where each project manager would approve my hours individually, and none of them were willing to accept any overhead. I was doing 5 projects at the same time. That lead to burnout on my part.

Now I have only one fulltime project and some side gigs (coaching a junior developer).

I am staggeringly allergic to this process, as it feels like piecework and shows a lack of trust of the staff. It’s resulted in all sorts of misreporting towards the ends of fiscal years to keep staff paid. If it’s so important to a company (such as R&D credit) they should hire an accounting clerk to handle the tabulation. Way cheaper than getting developers to do it and more accurate that the “gee, what did I do this week?” Friday afternoon think.

The business needed a "capex," or capital expenditure, thing. So we recorded our time.

Every Monday, I created an appointment in Outlook, set to Whole Day and Free. Then I just extended it day by day, recording the hours.

By week's end, I have a weeklong event that looks like

  6h ABC/2h Proj B, 4h ABC, 5h, 3h

Something like that. I then copied it into the timesheet. It's not too bad.

Don't let it poison your perspectives :)

If receiving grant funding for example, when the funding requires maintaining a timesheet then I do so.

For example, it helps to attribute effort to different phases of the work against plans and expectations.

I simply try to minimise the timesheeting effort and don't treat it as spying or lack of trust but to support stats and planning as above. It's a datastream!

I work full time remote. I don't have to fill out a timesheet

We used to have to do this.

A bunch of us started (truthfully) recording on the tinesheets how long it took us to complete our timesheets every day.

That was enough to stop the experiment after a few months.

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