The Lounge - CodeProject

Richard Deeming wrote:
He's obviously targeting the "we hate the Internet, but we love magic and other nonsense" vote.

Indeed. The same demographic that DD is after: conservatives. Laugh | :laugh:

Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)

OriginalGriff wrote:
Richard Deeming wrote:
He's obviously targeting the "we hate the Internet, but we love magic and other nonsense" vote.

Indeed. The same demographic that DD is after: conservatives.

Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.

I would agree with you but then we both would be wrong.

The report of my death was an exaggeration - Mark Twain
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs

I'm on-line therefore I am.
JimmyRopes

Richard Deeming wrote:
I'm not sure which polls he's worried about

The ones that are stealing our jobs?

Richard Deeming wrote:
rushed through "emergency" laws[^] to force ISPs and telcos to store records of everything that their customers do, despite the ECJ ruling that this retention was illegal;

Seriously though, I don't know why this is seen as bad. The person we democratically voted in(sort of) made a law and we are moaning because the ECJ (who we didn't democratically elect) declares it illegal. Surely we should be standing up for the person we elect to be able to make changes?

So next year, when Nige and pals take over, and they revoke the Race Relations Act so they can get away with their racist rants, we should support those actions because we "sort-of" elected them? Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

My point is that you were trying to say that DC did something wrong by going against what the ECJ had deemed illegal. But DC was elected by us whereas the ECJ wasn't.

If Nigel is elected at least you have the opportunity to oppose him.

I wasn't trying to suggest that I thought it was wrong because of the ECJ ruling. More that I think it's wrong, and the ECJ ruling supports that idea.

"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer

Richard Deeming wrote:
He's obviously targeting the "we hate the Internet, but we love magic and other nonsense" vote.

Wait, you're basically accusing DC of being a hippy. Laugh | :laugh:

Alberto Brandolini:
The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

I'm a programmer working in a small 7-man team of developers for a web design studio. We work in PHP/Symfony2 (rant for another day) and use Atlassian's JIRA ticket system for tracking issues.

We also use it for logging time. Frown | :(

This being the first job I've had in which time logging has been mandatory (log all work, log 7.5 hours per day) I'm finding it to be a huge obstacle to my productivity. A train of thought is a fragile thing, and stopping after every little thing (sending an e-mail, making a Git commit) to log the time I've spent on it and what I did is proving to be very effective at derailing it. Couple this with the pressure to get 7.5 hours logged on something or other every single day and I'm actually starting to dread coming to work in the morning.

Not only this, we now have a completely redundant physical whiteboard full of sticky-notes representing JIRA tickets/issues that must be kept in-sync with the digital system. By hand.

We're such a small team, we're all in the same room. But every time we want to fix an issue we need to:

Go to JIRA, mark the issue as 'In Progress'.
Stand up, walk over the the whiteboard and move the sticky-note to the 'In Progress' column.
Sit back down, fix the issue.
Go to JIRA, log the time spent on the issue and write a short description of what has been changed.
Mark the issue as 'Ready for Review'.
Stand up again, walk over to the whiteboard and move the sticky-note to the 'Ready for Review' column.
Go back to JIRA again and message the QA guys that there's a new sticky note in the 'Ready for Review' column.

I stress again, we're a 7-man web development team trying to be time-efficient, fast and agile. Everyone's practically going crazy about how everything takes too long. Part of it's to do with the bulky toolset we're using, but it baffles me that we can't slim down the ridiculous admin and let the developers do what they do best without having to watch the clock all the time.

So what's the verdict? Am I a crybaby or is this genuinely as silly as it all seems? Frown | :(

modified 2-Aug-18 21:02pm.

You'll probably find that this is more for whoever is bankrolling your development efforts so they can get an idea of how their money is being spent

Pain in the ass? Definitely, but it's probably keeping you employed, at least until the thing you are building starts to justify itself

Just a thought

That is all fouled up. Seriously? The board o doom is not meant to be such a chore. Ditching the manual board will be a great start.

Sounds like a real PITA.

What you might do is estimate the time spent doing the BS as opposed to actual work and submit it to the bosses. I would imagine if the time spent on BS is large enough they will find a way to slim it down?

Have you ever just looked at someone and knew the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead?
Trying to understand the behavior of some people is like trying to smell the color 9.

Log the time spent on logging the time and determine a percentage of total time spent. Of course, you have to log the time of logging the time and it becomes recursive.

I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office

Lilith.C wrote:
Log the time spent on logging the time and determine a percentage of total time spent. Of course, you have to log the time of logging the time and it becomes recursive.

Exactly, then there's the time going to the coffee machine and those times when team members want to come in and talk about nothing but just interesting enough to totally distract you...well you get the picture.

Have you ever just looked at someone and knew the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead?
Trying to understand the behavior of some people is like trying to smell the color 9.

The board is just plain stupid. If someone (manager?) wants to see what everyone is working on when he enters the room he can but large TV and hook it up with agile JIRA dashboard - should be cheaper in a month or two considering all your trips to the board.

As for the JIRA itself.. well.. there have to be some kind of tracking where the money goes. The problem may start if client can see it as it may be sometimes hard to explain why what they see (!) as simple change took 3 days.

--
"My software never has bugs. It just develops random features."

Seems like a terrible waste of time and effort. Have you considered logging the time spent on logging? That may result in a one way trip to the ext door or it may communicate that this is an inefficient process.

I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.

I once worked for a company that briefly wanted me to log everything in 15 minute increments and submit the log weekly. After the first week I turned my log in and my boss appeared in my office shortly thereafter. Seems he wanted to know why I had 4 hours logged as "logging time" for the week. I asked if he actually knew how long it took to check your watch every few minutes to see if 15 minutes had gone by, then write down what you did for that 15 minutes, then transcribe and summarize it at the end of a week.

They trashed the time logging after I explained the process to a few coworkers.

CQ de W5ALT

Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software

And I once worked for a company that demanded that all employees PLAN their next 30 day activities IN ADVANCE in 15 MINUTE INCREMENTS! I asked the VP if he wanted me to plan (and then log) my bathroom breaks before asking him how anyone could possibly plan all of their next 15 minute work increments for 30 days in advanced. An extremely broken company that I am very happy I left!

- Grant

Songshu Xinxu wrote:
I stress again, we're a 7-man web development team

And therein lies the problem; men do not multi-task well.. you need a woman on the team to truly get multitasking done...

But with women on the team the men won't do any (productive) work at all anymore Smile | :)

It's an OO world.

C#

public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
   public void DoWork()
   {
      throw new NotSupportedException();
   }
}

If the woman is an above average programmer, she can do all the work.

If she's not, but above average in looks, she can probably get the men to do all her work.

If she's average, she can probably keep everyone organized enough to do all the work.

The manual board is seriously stupid if there is a digital system.

However, I work for a defense contractor and we must log our work to 6 minute increments. This must be logged daily for accounting and auditing purposes. We are billing the government after all.

I just keep notes when I change a task, mark the time, and continue working.
At the end of the day I fill out the reporting, which takes about 5 minutes, and I'm done. It didn't take long to get the hang of it and now it's not all that disruptive.

I'm sure there is a way to streamline your process so it seems less disruptive.

As others have said, whoever is funding the effort probably would like to see how the money is spent.

I wouldn't get too caught up in the process, and just make sure you do solid work.

Welcome to corporate life. They just want to see where the money is being spent. It's not too bad if they don't get really anal about it, but then again most bean counters do.

That being said, I still don't like doing it. It's retarded, but I understand why it's done.

Jeremy Falcon

I used Tiddlywiki, slightly modified, with the TaskTimer plugin. Bascially I click the button type a sentence then go on. Worked pretty well but I wasn't trying to track for billing purposes.

Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one.

Songshu Xinxu wrote:
By hand.

Songshu Xinxu wrote:
Am I a crybaby or is this genuinely as silly as it all seems?

Silly would be a nice understatement.

Songshu Xinxu wrote:
let the developers do what they do best without having to watch the clock all
the time.

Ehr.. when done right, planning time is something that is beneficial. Using it against your developers means you're not making friends.

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

I've worked in a number of places that try to do time logging - and usually have fought against it for its entire lack of usefulness.

First thing I did was write a small proggy (what we used to call Apps back in the day!) to log my time so I could click a button every time I did anything, type in some text, and then display it at the end of the day/week.
When I went to log my time, I had millionis of entries - 2 minutes going to the loo, time spent getting coffee or tea, talking to someone, having a meeting, responding to an email from the boss asking if I had updated my times etc. etc.
They soon had so much data it was entirely unmanageable.

There is, though, a very good reason for logging the approximate time spend on tasks - and that is to improve processes and estimation.

If a task was estimated as 1/2 day and actually takes significantly longer, it's useful to know why to prevent under-estimation in future.

PooperPig - Coming Soon

	No - absolutely nothing to report
	Maybe. Or it could have just been the nylon carpet
	A little. (and please share the details)
	Yes, a lot. (and we absolutely need details!)
	Geomagnetic what?

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