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Our workers council (Betriebsrat in german) required certain features in our internal Bitbucket to be disabled to prevent such tracking.



You disabled code reviews and commit timestamps?


It's this interesting thing in Germany.

I'm sure I'm getting details a little wrong here, but basically if you're paying someone a certain salary to do a task, you aren't allowed to know how long it took to do it.

Microsoft Word has an example of this: The 'Total Editing time' tracking feature is disabled in Germany (and likely other countries.)


If I'm understanding this correctly from you, you mean that in the sense that if they complete the task in the time allotted, there shall be no record of specifically how much of the deadline it took up?

That seems like a decent managerial practice for some types of workplace, and it's definitely the model I have for my direct reports; but doing it by law seems like a bit of a shortcut for some reason to my anglo brain.


I -think- that's the general intent.

I also think it's an aspect that should be explored more. Sometimes people forget that the time to complete a task does not always correlate with the cognitive load of completing a task.

I've seen orgs where 'top producers' on a team slowly get loaded up more and more, eventually having 50-100% more points on a sprint than their peers on the team. They usually wind up 50-100% more drained at the end of the day too, and it winds up impacting their quality of life.


I believe their attacker model is a manager who can look at statistics on a web page. Not a developer who can do git-checkout. :)




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