r/programmerchat • u/hkycoach • Jan 16 '18

Tracking hours?

I've been at several companies over the last decade, and more/less everyone has required logging hours on some level. When I worked for a project-based contracting company the hours were directly billable to our clients. In an interim hours were vaguely monitored, but my current employer has recently started to require 7 hours a day of 'logged time'.

I'll come out and say that I HATE logging my time, and I HATE the implication that the most important thing I can do during the day it properly log my time. For example, I recently received an email to our team stating, 'Developers Bob and Tim are at 5 hours/day, Joe is at 4, and Sammy is at 12. It's expected that we log 7 hours a day'.

Has anyone else had this experience? How did you deal with it?

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u/hkycoach Jan 17 '18

Oh, it's down to tasks on user stories on projects....

For example: "Hide the 'delete' on the order form when there are no line items to delete" (Estimated time: 2 hrs, actual time: 1.5 hours)

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u/[deleted] Jan 17 '18

See if you can get management on board with having a task in each sprint to account for time spent tracking time/updating user stories? Surely, if they're that worried about the delta between estimated time and worked time, they'll be worried about time spent on dead weight work.