[blowski]

There are legal definitions in the EU and US (and probably most countries) for what counts as 'workplace abuse'. Being asked to fill out timesheets as a general company policy doesn't satisfy any of them, so in that case the word 'abuse' is inappropriate.

It's worth pointing out that a lot real and extremely serious abuse is not limited to third-world countries. For example, the USA has an estimated 60,000 slaves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Slavery_Index#Controver...

[Chris2048]

Implicit to "legal definitions" is that those definition are used when legal action is taken, ie. when the abuse has reached a certain, actionable level at which the authorities need to step in.

This HN discussion is not framed in a legal context, so not satisfying a legal definition of "workplace abuse" doesn't mean the word is being used inappropriately.

[pdimitar]

OPINION: If your definition of a "grown up" is to let people ruin your work process then meh, that's your choice. Don't try to impose it on others. Keep your disliking of what terms people use for your local beer pub and not on HN. Deal?

ON TOPIC: I'd definitely call a timesheet "a workspace abuse", yes. Most of the programming is a very creative work. Do you pester a designer for a complex image for a PR campaign? Do you go to him/her on the top of every hour and ask "what's up, you done yet"? Do you check a building's architect monitor every hour?

I am currently having a subtle and a very hard-to-detect bug in an e-commerce shop I am maintaining. It leads to losing a few orders each day (out of 100+). The people I work for are wise enough to understand that pinpointing the cause of the bug is 90% of the work and yes, it may take days -- days during which I add more defensive coding on several places, increase logging statements, introduce several new integration tests, and what not.

If I was forced to use a timesheet in this situation I'd honestly wouldn't even know what to say in it on the top of every hour. I would strongly resemble the private detectives in those noir animations I guess. "Currently chasing clue X" -- "No wait, that's not it. Damn it, I am out of cigarettes. I must persevere!" -- "The owner of the bar knew nothing. Damn. Moving on."

Would you want that in timesheets if you were the manager? How would it help you?