[jay_kyburz]

I don't think its unreasonable for somebody to be able to demonstrate they they worked the 8 hours they said they worked. Especially when a lot of the work is just "thinking".

Have you folks never worked with somebody who literally does nothing all day?

Have you folks ever paid programmers out of your own pocket?

I know agile is unpopular these days, but I've always liked daily stand-ups so I can describe what I "thought about" all day. What problems I faced. What was challenging about the design. What I discovered in my research.

Companies do have people who just burn out, get bored, or just stop working. How are you supposed to find those people if nobody ever has anything to show?

[andrewla]

Yes, we've all worked with people like that. They are easy to identify, regardless of what kind of metrics they throw out. All you have to do is use your subjective powers of observation, and have the courage to believe this instead of trying to justify it through metrics. If you are not able to do this then no amount of process or fake metrics is going to save your development team.

In particular, if you are measuring the number of hours people work as a way to measure productivity, then you are in deep, deep, deep shit.

[atoav]

Yeah I have worked with someone like that, but as someone who does actual work I don't see why because of that moron I have to document every step I am taking. Feel free to come in once a day and let me describe to you what I am doing, the rest is in the commit messages.

The guy I worked with was thrown out recently. Unless you work in complete isolation your peers know you are not doing your job, and once that pisses them off enough it will be more widely known.