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What are you folks listening too today?
Any insight into Ogletree Atlanta?
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Additional Posts in #OverheardAtWork
"she doesn't have good boobs" †
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“Chatroulette, but for apartment peepholes."
"She's like 30, but doesn't look super old"
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I feel like that's the only reasonable response to micromanagey BS like that.
Tracking time sheets is ONLY useful for one thing: billing multiple projects at once.
If a team lead resorts to that as a way of observing what people are doing, then they're being lazy in the extreme, hoping that there's some way to outsource their observations to their team itself, which adds burden to the team.
It also presents an approach of mistrust because you'll look at time spent to do "a task" as opposed to observing workflows to identify blockers and scaling bottlenecks.
Your BEST case scenario is that if the logs are perfect, you'll have some idea of where to look, but not necessarily know what to look for. Most of the time, the data is too dense, too messy, or too flat out incorrect to provide that well either.
Funnily enough, this isn't just true with people, but also with programmatic systems (e.g. the data pipelines i build for a living). Observability for response metrics and execution time only tells you where things are taking time, but you need to step through the code to see what's really causing it to resolve the issue. In this scenario, you DO get perfect time logs (usually), and even then, it's only a loose starting point.
So if you wanna know what's REALLY happening on the streets, the best way is to join patrol for a few days.
Work with your team, pair with them.
This is where having technical excellence in what you do is a key part of leading the team you're in. This is also where KINDNESS comes into play. Empathy that the other person feels scrutinised... they'll never perform their best like that. Give them kindness and focus on improving the workflow rather than improving the person.
While you're doing that, you'll find out the areas where it isn't the system but the person, and you can work that out too.
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In once had to track my time in six minute intervals when I was a network engineer. I facetiously asked in a meeting about our time keeping system if we could have a bucket for tracking our time, since it could take significant time to allot every 6 minutes to a project.
They thought I was serious.
They spent a few weeks arranging for everyone in the organization to get assigned to the time tracking project.
When I left that job 3 years later, it was still in place.
Yeah we're seeing some Aussie start ups try to emulate that too. Partly because half of them are owned by American Private Equity teams.
The finance perspective of this is we need to know what projects to track your cost to, because otherwise it throws off our profitability metrics. That being said, even 40 hours of variance is not going to move the needle. I always thought it was dumb how precise they try to be, at all companies I’ve seen this, as opposed to having managers assigning it themselves based on rough estimates
Yeah rough estimates once a week is a better way to do it tbh. Pretty sure most people will get that accurate enough.
Having to do time studies in the past the, managers who had issues with me adding time to create the tracker and times to fill it out were the same who had micro managing tendencies.
Honestly that’s exactly what they should be doing…I have timesheets and loath them, but at the end of the day it’s not really about enforcing productivity it’s just about evaluating profitability and is very worthwhile. Super annoying though.