Time Tracking

May I just say that I find tracking my time the most painful part of my job, far more painful than, say, writing documentation?

I've been trying to figure out why. I was reminded that when I was at Carleton I had to fill out time sheets for my campus job there, but I don't remember the experience: this leads me to believe that the experience was not painful as this time tracking is now. I don't know what causes the difference, but my guess is that I cannot simply state the start and end times and say "I was at work during this time". Because, of course, that's not what they want now: they want to know which tasks I worked on, and for exactly how long, and any down time between tasks needs to get shoved under the rug. (Because, you know, they aren't paying you to surf the web)

Yes, I know I'm using the conspiracy-theorist's "they". I don't care.

Plus, as I mentioned before, the UI I now have to track my time is itself extra painful. I'm certain that can't help.

Let's pretend you work in QA

Okay, so let's say that your job includes testing a new way of doing daily job FOO, and in order to test it, you're running the new FOO procedure on a test box nightly and comparing the results against the results of FOO running in production.

Now, suppose that after a month of this, every day matches up except for two days that show wildly different results.

Now, in reporting this to a developer who has to pour through detailed dumps of data files in order to figure out what happened, would you also report that those two days were the only two days you had to re-run the test FOO process because you'd typoed a password halfway through the test process, or would you leave that as a surprise for the developer to discover on his own?



In actuality, this isn't quite the scenario I just finished tracing through. In fact, the test FOO job had been restarted on three different days, but on one of those days the tester had properly restored the database before restarting the job. Also, I don't know the exact causes for failure - it could be a typo'ed password, could be a disk ran out of space, could be anything. The lack of notice about these restarts, though, is completely accurate.