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A comment on All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people. Parent comment

Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by repomies691 on Monday August 05, 2019 @04:47AM (#20612424)
Well, very situational question. My question here is mostly, what are the bad incentives caused when people time track their days for example in with 1 hour or 0,5 hour granularity with software development tasks? I have been doing that kind of tracking both professionally and in personal projects, and I don't see the harm caused.
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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by CogitoCogito on Monday August 05, 2019 @04:56AM (#20612471)
Fair enough. I mean I guess I wouldn't go so far as to claim that time-tracking is an obviously bad metric. However, I would definitely claim it can be poorly utilized. This metric is just a tool. Employed effectively it can increase performance. Employed ineffectively it can increase...time.

But generally I think my main point stands. We need to be humble enough to sometimes accept lack of control (i.e. not using certain metrics/processes) rather than deluding ourselves by through certain metrics that really aren't very good.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by Aeolun on Monday August 05, 2019 @05:30AM (#20612623)
The problem is not the tracking. It is your boss coming over after 3 days asking why this 1 day task is suddenly taking 3 times as long, and how much longer do you think it will take?

Never mind that the task spec changed 5 times in those 3 days.

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