One is the obvious debate about timesheets, which most comments (so far) seem to focus on. Personally, I'm of Joel's school of thought on this one--my ex-co-founder insisted upon twisting FogBugz into a time-tracking tool, with all of the negative results that Joel predicts.
But for me, the more interesting point is Joel's apparent uncomfortability with his role as a pundit-- recently he's attacked Gladwell's use of anecdotes (while pointing out his own culpability in this department), and now he adds another entry to his ongoing file on what a clueless boss he sometimes is. Is this self-examination somehow related to his relationship with Atwood?
Joel didn't like Gladwell's anecdotes because Gladwell tries to turn them into science that can be repeated when that's not usually the case.
Joel's anecdotes are for your entertainment. He never implies that you should do it his way or that there's some greater meaning to whatever he's writing about.
anyone know of anything (web, software-based, whatever), that does timesheets really, ridiculously, well?
I feel like this space is underexploited- and I can't figure out if it's because every company's requirements are so different, that it become hard to create a good product, or if there's really no target market segment for this.
If you ask people to enter their time, they will lie. Sometimes not on purpose, but they will lie nonetheless. And, they'll eat up 10-30 minutes trying to remember what they did and enter it in in a human-readable way. And they'll piss away some time/focus shifting from productive stuff to time-entry stuff and back throughout the day.
Of course, for time/materials folks-- lying is GOOD. It almost always means that you bill for more hours than you spend on behalf of the client. If you bill for an hour of time, you almost certainly aren't subtracting the 7 minutes you spend emailing your girlfriend and the three minutes you spent twittering about the bowl of oatmeal you had.
But I truly think that one of the most important things a person or business can do is understand how people spend time (and how that changes over time).
(note: I run RescueTime, which passively records how people spend time/attention. I also ran a time/materials consulting biz for 8ish years and constantly was nagging geeks to enter their billable time. Yuck!)
I've seen just one performance measurement system that works really. It must be done in a shop that does Test First development and maintains a comprehensive unit test suite. The shop must also use "story points" or something similar. To measure a programmer's performance:
1) Review a random sample of their unit tests
2) Count the number of passing unit tests that they write
3) Count the number of story points they complete
It's harder to game this system. If you write lots of trivial, worthless tests, then (1) suffers and you don't complete more of (3). Also, story points originate with the user, so it's harder to game those.
I used Slimtimer. There are tons and TONS of timer applications. Then I use the powers of CSV+programming or excel to massage the data into whatever inane format people want it in.
(Then I got a salaried job ;) Though keeping track of the time you spend on things is important for another reason: those "I'll be done in a few days!" declarations are either backed up by fact, or provably wrong.)
I just went to slimtimer. They are obviously trying to get businesses as customers. Their opening line:
All your timesheets are belong to us.
(it does rotate)
Right now we're working on a new product that does time tracking differently. For now, here's a list of some good apps: http://www.timetrackingresources.com/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it Joel, who suggested making daily reports in Excel with time spent and time estimated in hours for every task? Looks like his amnesia stretches further than he thinks )
