this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024

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Flight instinct intensifies (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] 77 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Ok, so I get the “good intentions” of the procedures - sanitary, patient health and wellbeing, etc - sounds good on paper. It yeah, you’re right that it’s demoralizing and easily causes burnout. I’ve had jobs where management absolutely didn’t trust their employees to do the right thing. They even went so far as to herd us into a janitors closet and then walk us to our desks (floating desk arrangements at a call center) like we were children.

The managers were told to walk up and down the rows and look for people not doing their job and fire them. We were told if we weren’t on active calls, we were to sit in our chairs with our hands over the keyboard in ready position for the next call. No talking; no reading books; no nothing. I’m sure somewhere on paper it sounded like a good idea. But it was the absolute most toxic environment I’ve personally been in.

Anyway, y’all should unionize.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fucking tech solutions to a manager problem. The manager should care about the metrics of wait time and client satisfaction.

If waits are low and satisfaction is high. Then who gives fuck all about what techs do in between calls.

Metrics like calls per tech or average length of calls could be used to better understand tech efficiency. Or even rings before pickup. A good pbx can help ensure calls are relatively equally spread between techs. This helps keep one tech from over working for another slacking off. You can have utilization goals so that you aren't under or over staffed (I'm of the opinion that a techs utilization should be roughly 75-80% and they should have downtime in their shifts to prevent burnout.)

It's stupid, inhumane, and impossible to expect an employee to track, bill, and work 100% of their shift.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I lost the only job I have ever left involuntarily on a helpdesk for a small system partly because of the tracking tools they used

I was top in the team by tickets closed. The person they kept was top by time per call (spent the longest time on each call/worst at efficiently fixing callers' issues)

Tech tools are not a solution for incompetent management

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

I bet scam call center have a better working environment that this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

just hire more nurses

Look, I get your point, but it's not like nurses grow on trees. (Especially good nurses.)

Things need fixing, but they need fixing far earlier than that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Stuff like this is the expansion of the state the Lenin railed so strongly against.

Why not just have the beeper let the nurse know? Do you think the nurses aren't washing their hands intentionally? Only report it if they're like, constantly not doing it! The goal here is surveillance and punishment not improved sanitation

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

As a healthcare worker, the nurses are absolutely not washing their hands intentionally. You'd be surprised how many healthcare workers don't believe in science based medicine.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Ask for per-task time tracking
Get angry when you use round numbers in your time estimates, because "How could every task possibly take increments of five minutes?!"
Get angry when you use arbitrary non-rounded time entries, because "How am I supposed to determine the average time it takes you to complete a task when there's so much variance?!"
Gets angry when you spend an hour every day filling out your fucking time cards, because "You're not supposed to bill for that!"
Gleefully accepts absolute garbage work that you just subcontracted to Fivr.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I used to work at a place that required daily progress reports on tasks (this was before agile took off so 'daily standup' wasn't a thing.). So I wrote a script to schedule my git commits throughout the week (so that I had at least one a day), and every afternoon it would pull my git history, generate a summary, and email it to my manager.

He knew it was automated and hated me for it but I had the most consistent and detailed reports. On the upside, it really trained me to make good commit messages. On the downside It really instilled me with a strong "burn the building down" kind of vibe that persists to this day.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall "why are you billing half an hour a day to admin"

"Um" says I "working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we're tracking our work under takes at least that long"

Then management shot themselves in the foot

Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.

Step 2. Assign a "tiny" piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.

Step 3. Don't assign any other work to the team

Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later

So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.

Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount

I don't think it's fraud since it's billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I'm glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

There's a certain dramatic irony in the effort to account for labor activity in the business making the actual process of work significantly worse.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fuck detailed work logging. Best I can do is tell you how much time I spent per client in increments of 30mins.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Had a coworker do it in 2 hours increment, customer asked to have him removed from the project because even emails led to being billed for 2 hours.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

Context switching tax

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

My company is very lenient with how I spend my time (as long as I'm somewhat in the office and get my work done, which I god danm do!) and it's absolutely amazing. Often before a big release I run out of work and since no one is tracking it, I can just work on optimizing/cleaning our code or fixing some UX issue. I mean what are people gonna complain about? Me not doing the work I already completed? If they ever start tracking us I'm jumping ship, our new team pushes out the best code this company ever had and if that's not enough, then nothing could be.

I'm also confused about this whole "constant meetings" thing. At work I have an analyst that does the vast majority of client communication for me. From how people talk about work, it makes me think "analysts" aren't a thing in other companies. My gf (also a developer) didn't even know what an "analyst" could be. Like seriously? I love that guy! Life would suck soo much without him. The only meetings I attend are technical or educational in nature. And our monthly team leader meetings, just because he wants to make sure everything is ok with us.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

I actually liked time tracking. It’s when reality went out the window and my imagination took over.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Yep, absolutely hate that. It's this insane belief that there's no tasks to complete in a project which aren't tracked on a board somewhere.

And you're always left with this dilemma of whether they just want to be left with this belief and they're not going to ask why certain tasks took longer.
Or if they really want you to work as slowly as possible, spending 5 minutes each to document and track tasks which are done in 15 minutes.

Or if they're even more insane and expect you to just not do those tasks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I've always been amazed when i get a new "seasoned" project manager and they try to really work on making all the tracking as efficient as possible so they have tons of metrics.

...and then nothing happens. We don't look at projects and tasks and figure out which work would be best for which team members based on past experience. We don't do any sort of optimization. We just track "velocity" and our estimates on release end up more dependent on how new the tech or the concept is (not knowing what we don't know) than anything else.