We had meetings with several people about 30min tasks being booked using the wrong category, despite both being part of the same budget. Absolute insanity.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 50 points 3 months ago (3 children)

My favorite was getting reamed because you put 30 minutes over the estimated hours on a task.

It made task accounting a nightmare as you'd have to dump hours onto unrelated task whenever something inevitably took longer than expected.

[–] Badeendje@lemmy.world 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Such incredible bullshit. Tracking is to learn and see where things go right and wrong.

The fact manglement then puts the onus on the employee to cook te books for them is bizarre. Once tasks go over budget you can have a talk about it in a retrospective or something. But half hours.. makes no sense.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah it's why at later jobs I advocate for complexity points and don't do consulting anymore.

Tying money to hours spent on a task just encourages all the wrong behavior.

[–] lightnegative@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, but, like, how many hours will it take for you to deliver 5 complexity points?

[–] FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

Yeah, exactly. My attitude is you can cook your own damn books, don’t expect me to log anything other than the actual accurate time. Although I work at a company where we have no time tracking at all, good to be free of it

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

my friend. you need to learn the scotty method.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I just don't work at places that do time tracking like that anymore.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 7 points 3 months ago

admittedly better solution

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah which is getting into time card fraud territory. Which is just encouraged by asinine time tracking policies.

[–] leisesprecher 6 points 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure, that a lot of these policies are put in place as kompromat. If everyone technically violates policies, everyone can be fired or sued for breaking policies if something goes wrong. Management knows exactly what's going on, but they also know that the company would collapse if everyone actually followed protocol.

[–] jelloeater85@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Someone really needs to justify their job?

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

The usual response is to overload them with work and basically hound them for ticket numbers, time allocation, budgets and adhere to a very rigid "no ticket, no work" version of the company policy. Preferably with all colleagues at the same time, just waiting at his desk before the boss walks in.

[–] leisesprecher 5 points 3 months ago

In that case, absolutely, yes.

Basically, their work was moved into other teams and it was obvious, that within a rather short time frame their team would be dissolved. And one way they thought to avoid that was to appear inexpensive by pushing any accountability away. Didn't work.

[–] abcd 3 points 3 months ago

Had the same once. At the beginning we discussed every Hour. I left the project after about half a year for various reasons. Being the only guy left from the initial team (as a freelancer!) I said I’ld still support the other guys but only from remote.

The annoying boss left shortly after. Initial project estimation (made by him) was wrong big time. The new boss stopped caring and the project is around 2500 hours above budget for one task alone.

That’s the project of three months for you that will reach its fourth year soon. To be fair the main machine is finished. But the scope is always changing… Customers doing customer things 🤷🏻‍♂️