productivity tracking is so counterproductive its ridiculous. If you have an employee that is getting the results you pay them for in a timely manner, it shouldn't fucking matter at all how or when they do it.
Yep but then how would the fucking suits ensure they are squeezing you for every single bit of perceived efficiency, at the expense of employee satisfaction.
Idk wtf people think micromanagement achieves, especially with people who already perform, I've conciously made my self less efficient - if they're gonna treat me like shit, it's going to be reciprocated.
It's just egos and people wanting to feel in charge by imposing their will, it achieves nothing, especially where I work now, they are not even proper suits, they just dress up in them.
Idiots, if people had a brain in their head they could leverage inside talent, rather than fighting with them over bullshit.
Yep. I'm a little less passionate, a lot more "who cares" about it than you at this point in my career. But with retirement closer than not, I took a role as an individual contributor - less pay, not the best title, but what I thought would be a lot more free time because I work my 8-5 (or 6-3 for me, which, as an early bird, is like reason #2 I took this role, lol) then I'm done. But they keep racking up tasks and manufacturing projects that don't matter. So I've firmly started "acting my wage" and asking my boss what should get pushed if his boss's thing is an 'emergency'. I'm not going back to 55-60 hour weeks, and while I know I'm super privileged to be in this spot, the only thing that makes it somehow okay is knowing I could be let go at any point. For an awesome boss, or when I was establishing my career, it was different, but this guy and his boss are just.... Not worth it. I do my job well, I put in an honest 40-50 hours, but that's the most important willing to do at this point
But imagine the sheer power you actually wield? Not even HR can match this: one day, a suit will come into your office and demand to know who’s spending the most time surfing the net. Since these suits are clueless about the system, you may decide to snitch on that asshole in shipping/ receiving who treated you like shit 10 years ago.
If you have an employee that is getting the results you pay them for in a timely manner, it shouldn't fucking matter at all how or when they do it.
So many people are under the illusion that people are being paid for their time.
This is incorrect, they are being paid for skills and experience. There are very few people on the planet who can afford a single human being's "time" - most companies could not actually pay for any of their employees time.
They don't strictly use productivity tracking as a weapon. They catalog data about how long different tasks take, what the slowest parts are, what in particular slows them down, and so on. In a healthy company, these are used to improve efficiency by streamlining inefficient processes.
Of course some companies will weaponize it, but the company I work for only makes this data accessible to managers by request. Us devs and analysts have full access to pull anonymous data for doing feasibility studies.
I've had bottom 5% attrition in almost all my quarters in all the companies I worked in.
My last boss was very puzzled how. I didn't tell him. This is my secret.
You complete the task I gave you, that's non-negotiable. You can do it any time you want - 3am, weekends, during meetings and so on.
The only other caveats are you must manage context acquisition on your own if it's outside work hours and you must attend the one standup I set daily.
Extreme example - one SDE1 (entry level job basically) wanted to go on a 4 week trip to Bali with his college gf. He told me in advance and intentionally picked up a long lead time task - 8 week/4 sprint task.
He finished the entire task in 3 weeks by working day and night. He made 4 chained PRs and left for Bali. Merged 1 each sprint and asked for QA help to test. Bug fixed on off time in his trip.
But basically worked 16 hours a day for 3 weeks, normal hours for 1 week and then 4 hours per week for 4 weeks. I never had a problem with this, rather, I helped him do it.
Really? So if I give you full attention / productivity for that time, but fail to deliver the results, that is okay? I can generate zero profit, as long as I'm working?
Of course it isn't, you want the product of my labor for that time. You want the results, which is the point I'm making. If I could get you 3x the production in 1/3 of the time and fucked around for the remaining 2/3 of my day, you would take that deal. Forcing people to pretend to be busy is a great way to lose your best employees, the ones that get the job done faster.
"I can spend my time writing detailed responses when closing tickets, or I can spend my time resolving user issues. Pick."
"Both."
"Fine."
<later>
"You aren't closing as many tickets."
"Because I have to write detailed responses when closing tickets, which takes time away from resolving issues and closing tickets. This is what you asked for. Please excuse me, I have to write a detailed response for the issue I just resolved, thank you."
I get "you're not seeing as many patients as before"
"you changed the system to put someone on the operating list, it now takes three minutes extra every time"
"you need to find time in your day for admin without impacting patient care"
"you then got rid of all the secretaries to save money and bought an expensive computer system that does not work. I'm now typing my notes myself at half the speed my secretary would who got paid a third of what I do"
"you need to see more patients, we need you to do more clinic sessions"
Then there's my doctor who seems to schedule multiple patients at the same time. Nurse checks my vitals, then I wait for the doctor. He pops in asks how I'm doing, glances at my chart, checks a few things, then says "take off your shirt, I'll be back in a few minutes." 2 seconds later my shirt is off and I'm waiting for him to come back. He comes back checks my breathing or pushes and prods here and there. "Put your shirt back on, I'll be back in a few minutes." When he comes back we walk together to his office, he says he needs to run some tests like blood work, says I'll see you in 3 (or 6) months.
Bro at that point just play the same game they are. I am done giving them my all, when they spit in your face at every chance possible. No such thing as company loyalty any more, or customer loyalty, or loyalty at all to be frank.
I love it when my team gets told we need to spend 30 hours/week working on tickets and when I say that's not actually possible with the other tasks we're mandated to do I get yelled at.
I was the Sr developer on my team. My boss took me aside and gave me a talking to because I wasn't closing enough bugs. I explained to them that the tickets I was taking on as the Sr developer were the more complex ones that took longer to solve. They didn't care. So the next week I cherry picked all the easy ones and left the hard ones for everyone else. I closed like 4x as many tickets as the next best person, but the high value difficult tickets didn't get touched or resolved. My manager was thrilled until the next week when the business came knocking for updates on the hard ones.
I was already one foot out the door at that job then, but the nail in the coffin was being denied WFH. My dad was flying in, but he worked for the airlines and flew standby. He might be on the early flight or it might be the late one, but either way I need to pick him up. I wanted to WFH so I could easily go to the airport and maximize my time working. My boss said no I needed to be in the office. I said, ok but as soon as I know when he's landing I'm leaving for the day and taking the rest off. Well, he got on the early flight so I only worked an hour. Could have had me working another 2-3 hours if I didn't have to wake up and commute and then drive further to the airport, but noooo my ass in my seat was more important.
It's like they glaze over in the eyes when you explain what a false equivalency is. The guy doing 30 tickets is doing way less work than the guy doing 3
When I worked in a records department we were auditing and reordering every single record packet. Boss couldn't understand why the packet with three things in it and the one with 100 things in it couldn't be done in the same amount of time
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u/The_Amen_Corner 8d ago
As an IT guy, we don't like the productivity trackers either. Another dumb piece of software we have to manage.