Ask HN: Do you register your hours at work?
I have been self-employed for 10 years but I have just accepted a full-time position as engineering problem solver at a product and project company.
I have a very hard time with the project mentality- build it fast, ship it, next one. Bit that's a different story.
I have been asked to register my hours down to internal meetings, on a daily basis.
I kind of want to know if my new managers also register their time.
It's time consuming and it takes a toll on the trustworthiness of how I spent my time.
I hoped it wouldn't come to this so fast.
Do you register your hours and how do you approach it ? Thx
I have to fill in a time sheet at work.
This is because in the UK companies can claim tax back if they spent it on R&D. (Software engineering salaries are subsidised in the UK, yes.) The timesheets are to support that.
My employer only cares that I log the correct number of hours worked against each code. They don’t care that I log them in the right order.
I usually fill in my timesheet once a day, based on which meetings I attended, and which tickets I’ve been working on.
I've had to do it, and always loathed it.
In my current job it's also a thing, and I try to be honest. That also means writing the hours I need to write hours (and other stuff, like checking the intranet for news).
In a previous job I had the situation where each project manager would approve my hours individually, and none of them were willing to accept any overhead. I was doing 5 projects at the same time. That lead to burnout on my part.
Now I have only one fulltime project and some side gigs (coaching a junior developer).
I am staggeringly allergic to this process, as it feels like piecework and shows a lack of trust of the staff. It’s resulted in all sorts of misreporting towards the ends of fiscal years to keep staff paid. If it’s so important to a company (such as R&D credit) they should hire an accounting clerk to handle the tabulation. Way cheaper than getting developers to do it and more accurate that the “gee, what did I do this week?” Friday afternoon think.
The business needed a "capex," or capital expenditure, thing. So we recorded our time.
Every Monday, I created an appointment in Outlook, set to Whole Day and Free. Then I just extended it day by day, recording the hours.
By week's end, I have a weeklong event that looks like
Something like that. I then copied it into the timesheet. It's not too bad.6h ABC/2h Proj B, 4h ABC, 5h, 3hDon't let it poison your perspectives :)
If receiving grant funding for example, when the funding requires maintaining a timesheet then I do so.
For example, it helps to attribute effort to different phases of the work against plans and expectations.
I simply try to minimise the timesheeting effort and don't treat it as spying or lack of trust but to support stats and planning as above. It's a datastream!
I work full time remote. I don't have to fill out a timesheet
We used to have to do this.
A bunch of us started (truthfully) recording on the tinesheets how long it took us to complete our timesheets every day.
That was enough to stop the experiment after a few months.