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I don't see how this solves the problem at all. I suppose it gives a "paper trail" that shows what you're working on each day.

But my experience is that this sort of thing (as you observe) really rewards those who are good at writing and navigating the social waters... rather than really reflecting work. If a manager is reviewing snippets, you just need to say what he wants to hear.

Even if it should be "Was kind of blah today, didn't get any work done, talked to Y about it for a while but still didn't do much", you'd of course write "Faced several challenges with X, but made progress; had meeting with Y and got useful feedback".

It's sort of an art, especially when it comes to full performance reviews. I used to be something of a savant on the subject.

I have yet to see ANY system which comes close to measuring programmer productivity, even in a relative way, that isn't prone to huge errors or gaming.

Same problem with interviewing, really; often social adeptness is what's being measured.

To be clear, I didn't say it solved the problem :-) I said Google tried to solve it. My experience of it was that it did have a bit of a 'motivating' effect (which is to say you felt bad if your snippet was 'read docs all day and am still confused', and it did have a bit of keeping track of things feel. But being self created, it varied a lot from engineer to engineer how the snippets read. And yes, it did test both social adeptness to some extent.

It's an automated form of micro-management trying to get you to justify yourself every single day. Sounds horrid.

It's horrid if you use it to judge or justify, it's actually not so bad if it's something you use to record and analyze without judgment.

That's to say if you do it personally for the purpose of self-improvement, it's fine, when there's a social aspect of trying to determine who is pulling their weight it's going to more dishonest.

> That's to say if you do it personally for the purpose of self-improvement, it's fine,

Exactly. If hundreds of thousands of salary and tens of thousands of bonus dollars are tied to it, there is no doubt judging, gaming and justifying will be going on.

I found the snippets helpful personally, in that I had a log of what I'd been working on at any given week (when I was there, they were weekly not daily). I don't think I was ever judged, at least not to my knowledge, about what I put in the snippets - they were informational, not evaluative. Pretty pleasant overall.

Oh, I know you didn't - you were, pretty obviously, criticizing it.

I see it as a pretty common thing to do though... either on annual basis (as a performance review) or a daily one (as a standup). Granted the theory of the standup is nothing to do with measuring productivity, but it gets noticed.

That sounds like it can be a good personal motivator if it's done privately, though.

It brings to mind what I do when I am having problems with my focus. I keep something like a "ship's log" of my time. I just note the time of day when I start doing something and then the time when my concentration breaks. Next to it I write what I was doing. Now I have a record of what I did, something like

  1543-1555  fooled around on Hacker News
  1555-1602  bathroom
  1602-1619  worked on presentation
  1620-1643  worked on presentation

and so on. So I can look back and see that my focus wasn't very good- I 'came out of it' after just a few minutes. And in the same way that forcing myself to log what I eat helps my diet, after a few things like that above I find the discipline to keep persevering when my attention starts to wane.

I think when we wear many hats we're susceptible to unproductive states of mind, and this little hack helps me a lot.

But I don't think it would be a good idea for public display. Depending on the boss, maybe it would be ok if s/he looked at it, but I dunno. I've never had a boss I didn't completely trust, but I think I'm pretty lucky that way.

Maybe snippets would work if they were just between a manager and his or her reports.

Never had a boss you did not completely trust? NEVER? I'd say you're beyond pretty lucky and into extraordinarily fortunate, and congratulations to you. I've only had two bosses I completely trusted, and one of them is myself. And now that I think of it, I don't even completely trust myself.

Never. I've only had a couple of bosses, and one (or two, if you count a research advisor) was in academia.

Even if you do "trust" your boss, I still feel like there's a carefully curated image of yourself you want them to see.

It's a pretty basic strategy - if everyone else is fluffing up their reports, you sure don't want to be the one who isn't.

I have a spreadsheet I use now and again to log in a similar way to what you do, but I additionally classify the time into work/personal/study/procrastination etc., and which charts the time breakdown.

Occasionally I will run it for a day, or even up to a week, check the breakdown, and pick goals to improve on, run it another week etc.

Running it all the time is too time consuming in itself, but occasional "checkpoints" help ensuring I maintain good habits etc.

Would never show it to my boss though - I feel confidentiality for those kinds of things are necessary to ensure you're absolutely honest with yourself. I'd happily recommend people working for me do the same, including withholding it from me.

I do this on my private google calendar when I'm in the zone. It works wonders. What gets measured gets managed. (I can only speak for self-management, I'm completely unqualified to talk about managing others)

Err...RescueTime?

Automates it all and self-games so you can set your own targets to beat.

The best part is that you actually think twice about going to that non-productive site because you know it's going to be staring back at you at the end of week report. Of course it takes discipline but sometimes little tools help.

Good tip, thanks.

I'm dabbling with quantified self strategies. I want to cover everything.

Health (BP, glucose, etc), food, pills, github commits, potty breaks, phone/chat/email, exercise, and most importantly sleep.

I want the data collection done passively (I will never journal).

I even want the total self app to periodically ask me what my mental state is. "Are you happy?" "Do you have a head ache?" "How does your tummy feel?"

Also http://www.timesnapper.com/DownloadClassic.aspx can be helpful (on Windows)

I've been doing something kinda similar for a long time, more like a work diary than a ship's log. I don't write down times or non-work things I'm doing, but I do keep a running log of everything I work on, including what part I'm working on, what I'm trying to get it to do, what solutions I'm trying, thoughts on them, any appropriate bug IDs, changeset IDs, etc. It's meant to be for my eyes only, so no worries about not offending anybody with what I really think of their code or appearing to be sufficiently productive to management or other such things.

I find it very useful for stuff like reminding myself what I was working on yesterday, last week, etc, what I was doing on it and why, and that sort of thing. Being able to search for class names, bug IDs, and changeset IDs is pretty handy too for getting more insight into why I did something, even if it was a while ago. I think it helps keep me more productive too, since I don't want to have to look back on what I did yesterday and only see a couple of sentences.

On one project I did that, very previse reporting. The customer wasn't happy about it, wondering if I was bullshiting him.

At another customer's there was a time reporting software. But instead of reporting real time, we were instructed to report normalized times over an 8-hour work day.

Yeah, that may be a little too detailed for customer reporting. It works for me for personal logging though.

The closest solution I've seen to measuring programmer productivity is pairing, followed by peer evaluation.

There is no hiding from a pair.

No, Google uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track performance. You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.

That way you aren't evaluated so much on when/how you work, but on what you accomplish.

(I should also include a note here about how you are evaluated by your peers at Google, which has its own set of benefits and downsides, but OKRs are meant to be a somewhat objective measure of output)

I remember dealing with both OKRs and snippets at Google. Personally the snippets were very helpful just helping me keep track of myself. I never ran into the issues the GP did which do sound unfortunate :(

Everything about your post is correct except the "No,". Googlers have both OKRs and snippets.

> Everything about your post is correct except the "No,"

My first thought when reading this was that I would have nodded in agreement 90% of the time no matter what the remaining content of the parent had been.

The "no" was directed at this statement, which I believe to be not very accurate:

> Google tried to avoid this scenario with 'snippets'

My point is that OKRs are meant to be used for tracking performance (such as what the article was talking about) and snippets are more for personal use or casually for information among teammates or other curious people who want to know what you work on.

Not sure why you're getting voted down (your comment has gone grey as I type this). I don't recall the OKR system being there when I was (at least not in any sort of formal capacity). The author of the submitted piece was talking about the perception of productivity however, and that was something snippets were designed to provide (at least that was how they were presented to me)

Ah, I've always used snippets more for personal use, so when the time comes to evaluate yourself you have a record. Yes, they are public, but they've always felt more informational than a mandatory log of what you've done.

It would seem that OKR results have more to do with how the objectives were set rather than a measure of performance.

Yes - your manager should be helping you set good goals.

What happens when he goals change one what midway? Do you lose the progress on current goals when it finally comes time to evaluate your progress?

Ideally you'd be evaluated on the progress you made on both sets of goals with consideration given to the fact that you weren't working on either set of goals for the entire quarter.

I can't imagine a manager who helped you set quarterly goals with objective completion measurements and then penalized you if the goals changed partway through.

There would probably be some discussion as to why the goals needed to change. If they were not set appropriately to begin with that might be an issues between you and your manager or might be an issue between him and his manager (maybe priorities weren't communicated effectively from higher up the chain) or it might truly be a case of changed priorities in the company (changing markets, change financial outlook, whatever).

>>You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.

This unfortunately has never worked. I don't if it worked at Google. But as far as I remember 'Setting goals' by and large works like premature optimization or at most in the theme of water fall model.

When we used that approach we found half way down the goal timeline, our priorities as dictated by the business totally changed. We discovered better ways of doing things which altered goals. Some times we found we were simply measuring the wrong things. Some higher priority stuff just preempts the existing business goals and tend to get abandoned etc etc.

I can see how it may work for business folks. Having targets like 'Increase revenue by $100 million', or 'Hire 10 new team members'. But in the grass root level day to day life can hardly be lived in the scopes of rigid goals.

Gaming "Objectives and Key Results" type evaluations is far older than Google. It's not remotely an objective measure unless you have an organization that has extensive knowledge of how to accurately assess effort based on set objectives.

From what I've seen, many organizations that try to formalize evaluations this way are easier to game, because the very idea that there are somewhat reliable metrics makes it easier to justify not following up as closely.

(I'm not saying it will happen, but I've seen it far more often than I care to; including once having a manager that didn't even inquire about what my team had done lately for three years - I didn't mind, I delivered what I should to other parts of the business, but he should have: he had no effective oversight over a team officially reporting to him that handled tens of millions in revenue; if I had messed up, his head would've been on the chopping block next to mine)

> if I had messed up, his head would've been on the chopping block next to mine

Maybe he trusted you?

This is likely the case but there's absolutely no excuse for a manager to draw a paycheck without at least asking what you're doing. If things seem to be going well and you trust the team, perhaps that's an infrequent high-level "what we did, what we're thinking about next” email but you should know at least that much.

A few years ago I was working on a long-ish project and was tracking my time for billing. I noticed that, every so often, I would total up time spent on this or that feature or behavior and wonder how in the world did that take so long?

So I wrote a small CLI tool that would let me write a short note and append it to a file. The note would be time-stamped, and the file name (or something) would reflect my current working directory.

I forget exactly the details (I should go find this code if I can) but the idea was to be able to record quick observations about what I was doing so that later I could go back and get a more nuanced picture than basic time-tracking might offer.

For example, I could do this:

     james:~/dev/BigProject$@ gem docs for stupid-easy-attachment gem do not match reality

The '@' was the name of my note script.

I'd then have a record of my trouble getting some gem to work.

If nothing else it was therapeutic. Sometimes just writing something out spurred a useful idea, too.

My time-tracking tool (JotBot) did allow for adding notes to recorded time but being able to record quick thoughts with little interruption to my work flow was a big win.

Thanks for the idea. I just wrote a similar thing, based on this. Credited you in the header. :)

Sweet! Good to see the idea spread.

Bloody great idea. Just implemented it too.

Adding a hostname and putting the log in a Dropbox directory means you can keep track across PCs easily.

Great idea indeed! I implemented it as well, and packaged it on pip :)

Me three! `gem install t-time-tracker`

Helps to alias it to something shorter. I use "t".

A nice extension would be to log the url of the current tab in the browser. Anyone knows how to do that from bash? (using chrome)

A few years ago, I worked about a small consulting firm that did the same thing. It was exactly as you described it. I would get in trouble for not writing enough, then I'd get in trouble for writing too much. Could never win. Eventually found out people were not only bitching about me, so I setup a daily search for my own name to keep on top of it. Started discovering key work information within their status reports that they weren't sharing with me, too. A year and a half there was 18 months too long.

Whoa, what the hell happened to my ability to write today? I drank waaaay to much coffee today.

I don't think snippets are really related to this particular problem.

Ultimately, at Google, the results are what matter: Did you implement a system to do something? Are people using it?

In that case, both teams demonstrated look fine: people are able to provision analog and digital channels. If the digital team is doing the same work with a smaller team, then that just makes the team look like they might be working at a higher level, which is good at promotion time.

I had this same idea back when Yammer was started. But I wanted the social network to match the org chart. Your tweets go to your team. Your boss retweets a subset to his boss and other managers. And so on up to the CEO. This would solve your unfortunate problem and it wouldn't overwhelm people with zillions of irrelevant tweets.