Some companies just want a panopticon. Many of them want to micro-manage, and have weird ideas that software development is a direct correlation between time and effort.

My current company it makes sense to try my best to the hour/half-hour, because we're consultants and that's how we bill our clients.

A past employer for me was the worst of both worlds because they had a consultant's mindset towards billable hours having been born of a law firm, but not the consultant's approach to billing software development work. We were classified purely as "overhead" and not allowed to "bill" our (internal) clients. Meanwhile, despite starting life as a law firm it was by that point mostly a call center, and call staff to lofty law firm partners look like babies that need a strict panopticon.

If in the US definitely a company fail to inform. Done properly developer salary supported by time records can help qualify some portion of the salary for the R&D tax credit. At least that's what they tell us where I slave (a $FORTUNE_500)

Where things fall apart for me is logging overhead time, like time spent waking up with the first cup of coffee while reading company emails or doing IT-ish tasks on my dev system. I have no idea how to account for those times that doesn't make a mockery of the "Other" time entry.

Ugh. I don't ever want to work for a company where my time tracking has to be so fine grained that I have to log bathroom breaks. Holy shit that sounds like a nightmare!

I actually worked for a company where they didn't allow me to have a bathroom break during working hours while I was remoting...such is life as a 53yo developer trying to make any kind of living in this industry.

In fact, I had to log X keystrokes and Y LOC every hour in order to be paid for that hour...talk about being a factory worker.

I hate to use the "you should be looking harder" trope, but every company I've worked at has had developers at or over 53, and not one of them had such onerous time tracking requirements.

One tracked time to attempt to get r&d tax credits on certain work. The other was an agency that tracked time in case of disputes with unruly clients (such as the time we had gone through 3 project managers and 2 CFOs while we worked with them, and they were desperate to recover money from their own bad mistakes). The rest didn't track time at all.

Not to mention that LOC as a metric has been an industry joke at least since the early 80's: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin... I've heard of funnier versions of that story, but haven't tracked them down yet.

LOC means ‘loss of consciousness’ in my industry, but I do t think that fits. What is it here?

Lines Of Code.

That model doesn't even make sense to me.

Some of the most productive hours are LOC removed.

Counting keystrokes?

That sounds nightmarish, man.

Gets me thinking. Back space, I can see arguments for it being +1, 0, -1 or -2?

This is utter horror and is pretty much asking for people to quickly code up something to type fake keystrokes when you take a break.

Usually its not that you specifically need to log your bathroom break, but rather that all your time you spent at work needs to be booked on _something_

Lol, I remember being in a billable environment and making so much shit up. Reading emails? Billed to project Y. Bathroom break? Billed to project X. Politely listening to my boss gab? Billed to project Z.

Now that I manage my own team I let them abuse the Other time entry. I only expect 70-80% billable anyways, which lines up with studies on productivity. Anybody expecting 100% productivity is an idiot and anybody reporting 100% productivity is a liar.

I'm fortunate to be in a place where our time-tracking is not expected to add up to 40 (or 80) hours a week. I log the work items I do, which sometimes is six hours and sometimes is one hour a day.

I make those a pretty broad category -- "email" "time waste" (that one's just for me). If the time tracker is simplistic and intuitive enough, then it doesn't have to be a headache.

At one previous employer I submitted a feature request for the time tracker that would have saved a lot of time - it was a button that would generate something that was basically "like last week but with some plausible looking random changes".

Now I think about it - should have been a cron job, maybe that was why it was rejected.

What level of granularity are you required to track? I track how much time a spend working on a particular feature, regardless of the type of work being done. When I take a break or start working on a different feature I make a note of how long I worked since I started. It takes less time than writing a commit comment, which I usually do right before I jot down how long I worked on it.