As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
(I’m not the author of this)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.
No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.
The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.
I personally have put in extra hours to complete a project for a client that I did the proposal for as the SME in the technology because I underestimated. I’m a salaried employee for my consulting company and didn’t get paid extra.
Our consultants in Brazil and Mexico though while they also don’t have to track their hours for our benefit. They have to get approved to work over 8 hours a day because of labor laws in those countries. I can imagine that if they might do more granular tracking so they can justify the need to work (and get paid) for more hours.
As a team lead, I’m just going to track Jira stories being done on time if I need to be on the approval chain.
I have heard about projects at my current company where we have to give the client free work because the requirements weren’t met within the time allotted. I’m sure there were internal retrospectives where we had to go through our Jira board and see why stories were mis estimated or whether sales underestimated.
But even that falls on the implementation side because one of the staff consultants or engineering manager has to sign off on an SoW before it goes to the client.
Even during the retrospective, no one is trawling through Salesforce for details. We are looking at Jira.
I’m not saying we don’t track work output. I am saying we aren’t tracking granularly in our time tracking system that is only for billing clients. No one is expecting us to track every hour.
When they don't, there are those hardliners that want a justification what they were paying for.
I said in another reply (don’t remember whether it was to you or not) that I avoid staff augmentation projects for a lot of reasons.
But if you are in consulting and doing SoW based work, it’s a dereliction of duty by your tech lead not to insist on signed change order if the requirements veer materially from the SOW. It puts your company at risk of not being paid and/or having to do free work.
However.
If you're ever on a project that doesn't turn out so well, it may suddenly become critical to account for all work done during every billed hour in detail.
I would advise all consultants to track their time diligently and completely.
Those traceability artifacts are in order
1. the signed statement of work - this is the contract that is legally binding.
2. The project kick off meeting where we agree on the mechanics of the project and a high level understanding of the expectations
3. Recorded, transcribed and these days using Gong to summarize the meetings, deep dive discovery sessions.
4. A video recorded approvals of the design proposals as I am walking through it.
5. A shared Jira backlog that I create and walk through them with it throughout the project
6. A shared decision log recording what decisions were made and who on the client side made them.
7. A handoff - also video recorded where the client says they are good going forward.
I lead 2-7 or do it all myself depending on the size of the project.
At no point am I going to say or expect anyone on my project to say they spent 4 hours on Tuesday writing Terraform.
But then again, my number one rule about consulting that I refuse to break is that I don’t do staff augmentation. I want to work on a contract with requirements and a “definition of done”. I control the execution of the project and the “how” within limits.
I want to be judged on outcomes not how many jira tickets I closed.
When I was at AWS I worked with a client that directly hired a former laid off ProServe L6 consultant. He was very much forced into staff augmentation where he did have to track everything he did by the hour.
You could tell he thought that was the fifth level of hell going from strategy consulting to staff augmentation. It paid decently. But he was definitely looking and I recommended him as a staff consultant at my current company (full time direct hire)
FWIW: I specialize in cloud + app dev - “application modernization”
I will not touch a staff augmentation project - ever.
I only work on projects that for all intents and purposes are fixed fee projects where we sign a contract promising that we will deliver x for $y.
In some level of granularity, we track what stories are complete in Jira and alarm bells go off if the burn down isn’t trending correctly. But we aren’t logging every hour we spent in Salesforce.
This was true when I was working in the consulting department at AWS (ProServe) and is true now at a 3rd party AWS partner.
I have also had to provide technical support in escalation meetings, predating delivery of said sheets.
Wouldn’t it be a checklist of - these are the 5 requirements and they were/were not met?
Wouldn’t the spreadsheet be a list of requirements and not hours?
Then comes all the argumentation why all those hours were required for each item, due to project delivery challenges on either sides, decisions that would require even more work, needless efforts spent in stuff we shouldn't have done as part of fixed price, and so forth.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.
> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.
> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
From my experience working on and being the third highest contributor to what was a very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to justify why it should it exist and why should we keep getting resources for it. This is the same reason that the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article did it for his project.
The next reason is that to get promoted and to have something to put on your promo doc, you need to show “impact”.
But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to check it off the list and stay in compliance. But everyone if any importance knows you.
That’s true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.
However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying to get promoted to a director or something (a manager role would be a horizontal move). I said “no”. he said not really.
I keep a personal career document just in case I need to prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview - I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.
Then back to my minor criticism. It’s not like at a staff level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a network, you are going to be blindly submitting your resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going to look at it. They are already targeting you to work there.
I had a director who was a former coworker at a well known non tech company basically offer to create a job just for me because he needed someone who he could trust. I’m not special, I just have a decent network and made a positive impression on a few people
Hell I was a lowly L5 consultant who they only entrusted to small projects and slices over larger projects (fair I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time) and no one micromanaged me as long as I was doing my job. I flew out to customers sites by myself to lead work and my manager rarely knew what I was doing. I would go weeks without talking to him.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
Most of the time was spent on cost cutting, customer vs producer surplus, profit margins, efficient markets theory, lots marketing, lots of "the purpose of a commercial enterprise is to make money for its owner" said in different ways, and maybe some operations analysis.
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
(Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are, uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to constantly manage upwards.
While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
That said it's always good to have receipts.
When you get ready to interview for your n+1 job, and you spent months grinding leetCode and practicing reversing a btree on the white board, get to the behavioral interview and I ask “what accomplishment are you most proud of?”, what are you going to say “I worked with my team and we together closed 20 story points a week”?
I have given the thumbs down to a lot of candidates this year alone who couldn’t discuss something that they took ownership of or where they stood out.
You were delegated a manager's job?
>As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your memory.