[whack]

I think his point is that just because an employer wants to log your time, and see how you're spending your time while at work, doesn't mean it's abuse. If they're paying you for your time, it's perfectly reasonable for them to see how you're spending your time.

Now, whether you choose to put up with it or leave, that's a different question. Given a choice, most people would choose an employer who gives them more latitude, as opposed to one who is monitoring them that closely. But that's an argument based on practicality, not morality.

[zaccus]

The overall point is that there isn't a 1:1 correlation between time and productivity in this industry as there is in, say, working a cash register.

I might spend a couple of hours trying to debug something screwy with my dev environment, or googling around and thinking about what the solution to a problem, that doesn't create more tech debt, should look like. I might spend time dealing with feedback in code review, some of which may be beyond the scope of the story or not immediately perceptible by a stakeholder, but it's work that needs to be done nonetheless. Project managers are not developers for the most part, so they have to trust me on that.

When you hire someone to do tasks that you could do yourself, then asking them to log time is reasonable since you know what needs to be done and what the timeframe should look like. Asking a highly skilled employee such as a software developer to log time is an insult to their judgment and a waste of their (and your) time. You can't gauge my productivity from a time log.

This quibbling over the term 'abuse', like we should all just be thankful we're not sex slaves or PHP devs and leave it at that, is completely irrelevant. Fine, it's not abuse. It's just antagonistically treating your employees like untrustworthy delinquents. Is that better?

[blowski]

Precisely. You're saying that having to do things you'd rather not do is 'abuse', when I'd just call that 'being a grown up'.

[tostitos1979]

You know there were grown up programmers in the computer industry before we got the MBA-types involved as PMs. Frankly, I'll be very happy to keep track of minutes I spend coding if all PMs in the org had to take a basic programming competency test. Lets say something easy like inverting a linked-list (with pointers yo) or b-tree deletion. I think some PMs are "tech clueless" but have worked their way up because they are effective at bullying. This is not true of very PM but certainly some PMs.

[am8]

1. Do you need to know how to invert a linked-list (with pointers "yo") to pass a basic programming competency test? No. No you don't.

2. Why point out that it is "easy"? Is it so you can feel superior to people who might not know this?