Amnesia
joelonsoftware.com
joelonsoftware.com
ok if you look at the window to the left of the top right most window, its the silhouette of batman !!!!!!!
One is the obvious debate about timesheets, which most comments (so far) seem to focus on. Personally, I'm of Joel's school of thought on this one--my ex-co-founder insisted upon twisting FogBugz into a time-tracking tool, with all of the negative results that Joel predicts.
But for me, the more interesting point is Joel's apparent uncomfortability with his role as a pundit-- recently he's attacked Gladwell's use of anecdotes (while pointing out his own culpability in this department), and now he adds another entry to his ongoing file on what a clueless boss he sometimes is. Is this self-examination somehow related to his relationship with Atwood?
Joel's anecdotes are for your entertainment. He never implies that you should do it his way or that there's some greater meaning to whatever he's writing about.
If I may, I'll plug the "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks" documentary that Joel sells. It was much better than I expected.
I feel like this space is underexploited- and I can't figure out if it's because every company's requirements are so different, that it become hard to create a good product, or if there's really no target market segment for this.
any thoughts?
(Then I got a salaried job ;) Though keeping track of the time you spend on things is important for another reason: those "I'll be done in a few days!" declarations are either backed up by fact, or provably wrong.)
I agree, it's funny, but see you later!
I have no idea whether they're good or not, but they're profitable and he's a nice guy. Worth a try!
If you ask people to enter their time, they will lie. Sometimes not on purpose, but they will lie nonetheless. And, they'll eat up 10-30 minutes trying to remember what they did and enter it in in a human-readable way. And they'll piss away some time/focus shifting from productive stuff to time-entry stuff and back throughout the day.
Of course, for time/materials folks-- lying is GOOD. It almost always means that you bill for more hours than you spend on behalf of the client. If you bill for an hour of time, you almost certainly aren't subtracting the 7 minutes you spend emailing your girlfriend and the three minutes you spent twittering about the bowl of oatmeal you had.
But I truly think that one of the most important things a person or business can do is understand how people spend time (and how that changes over time).
(note: I run RescueTime, which passively records how people spend time/attention. I also ran a time/materials consulting biz for 8ish years and constantly was nagging geeks to enter their billable time. Yuck!)
1) Review a random sample of their unit tests
2) Count the number of passing unit tests that they write
3) Count the number of story points they complete
Yes, I'll do them, probably this week when I have a spare hour, but how accurate do you think they will be?
if you go back a bit they still look the same ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000077.html & http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html I do like the evolutionary design, but older articles miss out. The particular post reads like a fluffy advertisement without much substance. Luckily you can listen to the excellent StackOverflow podcasts ~ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/podcast-32/
No - not to measure programmer's time and attendance.
One is about project management - the other is about the dreaded "Human Resources" and that should not be encouraged.