Comment by JimboOmega | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimboOmega | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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