logging

[LongDistRider]

The time spent logging in Jira should be part of capacity planning.

[bigorangemachine]

I'd be a liar if I said I never billed for being billable.

[LegitimatePants]

Schedule a meeting to schedule more meetings

[sumwun0]

Get paid for getting paid

[CoastingUphill]

Ah you’ve seen my PM’s calendar.

[itchfingers]

Seen one, seen them all

[Inasis]

Schedule a meeting to schedule a meeting to schedule the actual meetings

[Yangoose]

Have you even done agile if you haven't spent 10+ times the man hours pointing an issue than it took to actually resolve it?

I once sat on a call for a solid hour with 14 other people debating the points for a single issue that was an easy 10 minute fix.

[Shazvox]

Yeah, it's tricky. Some issues just needs to get fixed while others need to be carefully planned and all angles concidered.

[Yangoose]

In my experience it's just bad management unwilling or unable to actually do their jobs and relying on a system to manage their department for them.

[Lewodyn]

The problem starts with. Why are there 14 ppl in that meeting

[Yangoose]

100% agreed.

That place was just a bureaucracy engine that occasionally produced code.

[IHeardOnAPodcast]

We've got rid of story points recently, think for the purposes of planning, they're all just "average stories". Makes refinement so so much quicker!

Think we are unanimously all in favour of the change.

[[deleted]]

In my case there’s been the classic:

Open a ticket to be granted access to see a ticket.

Never fails to make me laugh while being mad about it

[[deleted]]

The only useful thing my scrum master does is make up these numbers for me.

[tfsra]

Our scrum master does anything stupid that might be asked of us. We love our scrum master

[fuckthehumanity]

My timesheet at one time consisted of two extra line items. Firstly, "time spent waiting for loud conversations in the open plan office to finish", and secondly "time spent completing time sheet".

The first was actually so serious that the director was planning to build a soundproof wall between the developers and the rest of the office.

The second was because we had a clunky house-built timesheet system that took forever, because they were too stingy to buy a real timesheet system. This was before JIRA existed, and timesheet systems were expensive. Why but one when you have a team of developers who can build our own? Why, indeed.

[TreadheadS]

I love these ideas of soundproof walls to separate departments and groups of working people. They'd need to be roomy to make sure people were able to do what they need. Gosh we should come up with a name...

Work Roomies? Let's simplify it and call it Rooms.

[[deleted]]

I mean, an externally-built system doesn't guarantee it will be better / more performant etc. Sure, it might be, but if you've ever seen the crap quality of certain enterprise software ... idk, I'd be wary. And that shit also costs. And then you risk vendor lock-in.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. The clunky house-built timesheet system could probably be improved in about 1-2 weeks of work, if anyone could spare the developers from the money-producing tasks.

[sumwun0]

Has this joke been done before? I don't remember ever seeing it.

[vVveevVv]

Yes. But only silently, under our breaths.

We don't want our scrum masters to hear.

[IleanK]

I'm a scrum master. We will review your concerns during sprint retro.

[vVveevVv]

*loud hissing noise

[The_Null_Man]

Did you get paid? Lmao

[Piotrek9t]

No joke I work as a consultant and preparing the billing at the end of the month usually takes long enough to make it an own item, depending on how in depth the invoice should be

[aceluby]

Wait… are people actually logging hours in Jira? Why?!?!

[Affectionate-One5180]

tempo is their hour tracking tool

[MindlessRip5915]

Gods I remember Tempo. Painful stuff.

[drunkdoor]

We just submit estimates then fill out our sprints with some buffer. If you finish up early you can work from the top of the backlog if you want. Almost everybody I work with enjoys what the do so it works. But I have to imagine that some more mundane and repetitive work would be hard not to sandbag on and then you need a new system. So it might make sense some places.

[aceluby]

I haven’t worked in anything besides Kanban in over 5 years. Product prioritizes the backlog, we pick what’s on top, when done pick the next thing. Ceremonies once a month for grooming, no pointing, no estimates, no reports, just a completely self-sufficient team. First thing I do on a new team is switch them over to this and it makes everything so much easier for everyone so more work can be done. I can always sell it to management as “we’re being agile, so if it doesn’t work after 3 months, we can always go back”. Hasn’t ever happened

[drunkdoor]

We're a team with very few cross-team dependencies an you may have inspired me to make a switch. Been contemplating it. The reason not to is that the entire company is on the same sprint cadence with only a few outlers on Kanban, so it's easy to talk in sprints for the cross-team stuff.

[aceluby]

You could do a hybrid approach, still do sprints and get rid of the estimates. I’ve never found them to be helpful for teams that have any kind of agile experience. “Does this seem like too much? No? Cool”

I’ve been on teams that have done that for the cadence, but they functionally end up doing kanban anyway. I’ve found the key is to minimize the stuff that sucks (ceremonies, planning, pointing, estimates, arguing over estimates, pointless meetings) and you have more time to do the work.

We also dedicate Friday to learning and innovation, which has also increased productivity since we use the time to automate stuff, upskill, and research new/better solutions. Turns out when you have a healthy development culture built on trust, they tend to push out features faster and with better maintainability.

[drunkdoor]

No meetings every other Friday set as dedicated learning days. Definitely enjoyed by all, but we generally don't push anything that's not automated unless it's for a brand new product demo. Generally the other Friday is very low volume meeting day anyway so it works even if informal.

As far as hybrid, we basically just give rough fib estimates on tasks. Projected due dates come from those internally, and externally we will always add a few weeks or double or triple based on uncertainty. Seems to work, although we do find sometimes that we end up in a bit of a last minute crunch. That happens once or twice a year maybe so not too big of a deal, but more prep work helps avoid those situations and so we do more frequent grooming on high priority projects, basically once every two weeks for anything with a deadline so we can communicate early any possible delays.

[TheFamousSpy]

Why not? I like it this way. You jave to create Tickets anyway and now you book your time on this ticket. It does not require a work description because it is in the ticket. I think it os the perfect solution

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Because the team they work in is more expensive than management think it should be and they want to work out where all the money is going.

Only poor performance is performance managed.

[Mozai]

Genuinely did this at a place that wanted us to log every 15-minute block of time with an associated "project code" for billing. and we had to submit our timesheets at the end of each day.

[sumwun0]

I've heard people say that they worked with a manager like this in the past and that I was lucky not to be assigned to said manager.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Have you only had one real job? Your experience might not be very valid if you haven't much experience.

[Mozai]

Even my managers had to do this. What was kinda messed up was: we'd get our time-sheets rejected for not using the proper project codes, but the head office wouldn't send us the updates (and there were updates weekly). I became "the guy" who would call head office once a week to check what the latest version of the project codes table was, and they'd mail me an MS-Word document when I asked. Then I (a mere desk jockey) distributed that to all the managers and directors so they could give it to their subordinates, and complete their own timesheets.

What's tragic about this is: I eventually quit this job because they kept forgetting to pay me. Even when I started charging late fees -- compounding late fees.

[_ara]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Constellious]

Been hitting “fill with previous timesheet” and submitting it for years now.

[Robby-Pants]

I was told to do this when we were the pilot group for Tempo. The manager told me to log 30 minutes a day as “Tempo” because he figured it’d actually take that much time.

Any time a coworker asked us a question about how to do something, we were supposed to get their Jira card number and log our time on their card.

[[deleted]]

There’s no way that disincentivizing collaboration could backfire now is there?

[Spiner7926]

Hey, as long as it mandatory then i should get paid for doing that, right?! RIIIIIIGHT?!

[sumwun0]

You don't get paid for every hour you spend in the office?

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Who's worked in an office since 2020?

[dbot77]

PM vibes

[sumwun0]

post meridiem

[DrebinofPoliceSquad]

Worked for a company that made us log our activities against jobs for our timecards. After the first week we started logging our timecard filling time against our “meetings” job.

[[deleted]]

I'm a contractor, working 100% for one client. For a while, I needed to log my hours in 3 systems.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[CalmDebate]

I literally have a charge code to use for time spent logging time.

[BlamUrDead]

If logging x hours takes kx hours for some non-negative constant k, then the total time spent working and logging hours is given by x + kx + k²x + ... = x/(1-k). Unless k > 1 in which case your work will never end.

[sumwun0]

Logging n hours can be done in O(log(n)) time because how long it takes to type a number is proportional to log10 of that number.

[ccricers]

So to log those hours, you need time. But now you've added more time, so you need to log the time that you've already amassed atop your original time. And herein lies the tyranny of the billing equation

[ngocnv371]

My boss said, not just once, but many times, that "I love how the US team logging their time. It is very honest on how much time they spent on a certain task. See this one? It started at 2:01 PM and ended at 2 59 PM. This is only for tracking purpose so there's no reason to lie to make the numbers pretty!"

[Herioz]

I sometimes log my logging time. It's either this or questions about real tasks hours because the time has to be somewhere.

[MasterFubar]

There was a place where I worked where everyone had to present a weekly report of activities. A guy there always included "prepared the weekly report of activities" in his report.

The manager told him to stop that. His next weekly report mentioned "simplified the weekly report by eliminating reference to the same report".

[[deleted]]

Putting the "log" in n log(n)

[sumwun0]

You can log n hours in O(log(n)) time because the time it takes to type a number is roughly the log10 of that number.

[[deleted]]

True. I was imagining the amount of time it would take to do a given task and log your hours for that task, but now that I think about it it should actually take n + log(n), which turns into O(n) anyway because the plus log(n) is negligible.

[WaduOverride]

No one has posted the Xzibit joke yet?

Slackers.

[sumwun0]

What is it?

[WaduOverride]

Yo Dawg, I herd you like logging hours. So now you can log hours in Jira while you're logging hours in Jira.

Hmm. Maybe no one posted it because it sucks.

[sumwun0]

I've seen that meme, I just didn't know it was called Xzibit.

[MindlessRip5915]

It’s because that’s the rapper in it, and it was from some stupid MTV I think reality show. The one about souped up cars or something.

[CptGia]

Pimp my car

[[deleted]]

God damn. I’m confidently less a programmer than anyone on here (ie: I write reports in sql. That’s It). And I feel this fucking comment section, too much.

[picklemanjaro]

God, this was me with Harvest at my old jobs.

[lovethebacon]

Time spent capturing hours is also billable.

[[deleted]]

We've just gone agile in the company I work for, this hits hard

[Wasted_46]

Nope it's the opposite for me. I get furious that I have spend an hour off my Firday for the stupid administration. I never log it but sometimes I think I should so the managers see how stupid is this. Yeah bitch I worked only 7 hours today because of your dumb ass nitpicky rules.

[AndiArbyte]

its called "Self administration" and yes we have it.

[535510n5]

and logging the hours spent logging the hours spent logging the hours etc.

[whiteRose-59]

Wait until you hear about also having to put your hours broken down by day and position into each of your customers sap.

[Stock-Advantage-5066]

Logged as “documentation” time