

Amnesia - geeko
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/10.html

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axiom
I only noticed it on the second glance, but that's Hacker News on the Dell
laptop screen.

~~~
aston
If you look to the left side of the header image, those guys all have reddit
bobblehead dolls.

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michael_dorfman
There's a couple interesting things here.

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?

~~~
johns
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.

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Eliezer
That poor guy. I sympathize; I've also had that experience of "I'd never say
THAT!" and then someone shows me the quote.

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eoyola
Ha, it was video footage by Lerone Wilson that gave him away.

If I may, I'll plug the "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks" documentary that
Joel sells. It was much better than I expected.

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unexpected
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.

any thoughts?

~~~
webwright
Joel is absolutely right.

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!)

~~~
stcredzero
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.

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PStamatiou
since when did joel redesign his permalink pages? nice stuff.

~~~
bootload
_"... since when did joel redesign his permalink pages? ..."_

if you go back a bit they still look the same ~
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000077.html> &
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html> I do like the
evolutionary design, but older articles miss out. The particular post reads
like a fluffy advertisement without much substance. Luckily you can listen to
the excellent StackOverflow podcasts ~
<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/podcast-32/>

~~~
PStamatiou
those two links dont look the same like this article. this post has a big
header and drop shadow around the body

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snitko
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 )

~~~
bdfh42
Yes - to keep track of the project and (over time) to factor in the
programmer's error rate in estimating completion times.

No - not to measure programmer's time and attendance.

One is about project management - the other is about the dreaded "Human
Resources" and that should not be encouraged.

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Jem
Is that the new Inspiron mini on the left, or his main screen that huge it's
dwarfing a regular size laptop?

~~~
Retric
I think it's a 15inch laptop so it's not huge. But, just compare the screen to
the books, keyboard, or mouse, it's freaking huge.

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delackner
Delegation of responsibilities is difficult to do and even harder to stick
with, but the rewards are worth it.

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tryke
I read this article last night, then promptly took his "stop listening to me"
advice. Unsubscribed from his RSS feed. See ya, Joel!

