At a previous job, software testers had to write reports every Mon/Wed/Fri on what they did and e-mail them to their supervisor.
One of them got pretty tired of writing the same shit, and was like 99% sure the supervisor wasn't reading the reports, so started adding "I don't think anybody is reading these. This is a waste of my time." right above his e-mail signature.
It took over 3 months before it got noticed. Supervisor wasn't pleased, but had to admit he was right. He still required reports, but only on Fridays.
I did the exact same thing years ago, except, after about two or three daily reports I took the immature route. I started inserting lines like, "10:45am, took a shit", "11:03am, scratched my balls", "11:04am, farted; smells like Robertos", and so on. The main difference in my situation was my supervisor noticed immediately. However, the daily reports stopped anyway. The rumor I heard was that my supervisor took my immature reports to his boss in hopes of getting his blessing to fire me, however, his boss actually turned it around on him, saying the daily reports requirement was counter-productive, and "treat people like children and they'll act like children".
We used to receive so many automatically generated emails and I really doubted that anyone was reading them but every time I asked if I could disable them people would swear that they were essential. I got so sick of them that I commented out the line in the script that sent them with a note that I would pay $20 if someone found that line. Nobody ever noticed that the emails stopped and I left years later without paying.
One of the first things I do at every job is setup outlook rules to auto forward all those Atlassian, slack, etc auto generated emails to respective folders. I never look at them, it's never a problem. It's amazing the huge effect that reducing the information overload has on one's day to day sanity.
I did something similar to this a while back with a one-liner aliased in my Bash includes, called gitsum (short for git summary).
alias gitsum='git log --pretty=format:"* %s" --author `git config user.email`' #myself
It gives my git commit messages as a Markdown bullet-point list. It only works per-branch unlike the linked gist, but one cool thing about it is that you can tack on additional git flags, such as --since. For example:
There was a time where my company decided to implement time sheets after a consultant said it is a nice thing to do.
I wrote some code that generated random data in the right format and people begged for it so I shared it.
Plenty of people started to create random reports, their bosses didn't give a fuck because they were pissed of as well (and wanted to use my tool as well).
The company ended up with a heap of nonsense data and I guess that someone realized that because this circus was gone after a few months.
That was in one of the largest and best known US company in the 00's, no wonder it went from a national pride to a peripheral company.
I look forward to the day the manager can have a daily standup/progress report meeting oblivious to the fact that (s)he is the only one actually present... One step closer!
This seems like a good place to integrate an LLM - go above and beyond with lengthy, formal-sounding descriptions. Spot check the first few of them, because someone might read those, but after that they'll just be impressed at the work you're putting into your updates and never read them because they're long anyway.
LOL
I have to do weekly report and submit it every Friday.
The kicker is, I have a meeting Monday morning about what I'm doing the week and what I worked on last week.
That's... good, right? You write a report on Friday, and come Monday morning you can just read the points from that very report during the meeting. Zero stress.
sounds like friday is backwards looking and monday is forwards looking but yes, that'd be good too because you'd know what was expected of you the coming week.
Yes, but I think these are just saved to when something bad happens. Then the Managers will review them looking for someone to blame. Just a CYA activity.
The last startup I was at went hardcore with their JIRA Hygiene. All of the developers complained, but it turns out our director saw the layoff writing on the wall. He wanted as much ammunition as possible to try and save his org. Once the consultant came in that the board hired, the first thing they dug into was the JIRA tickets.
The funny part about this though was that our team had amazing JIRA hygiene because we barely had any work to do (I'm not exaggerating when I say I would have about 5 hours of work a week, I would try to help other teams out but that was "stepping on other teams turf"). The teams that had the worst JIRA hygiene were the core platform teams shipping new features. Our team built internal tools so we didn't have to care about UX/scaling/etc.
Ultimately some of our team was laid off, but it made me realize upper management really had no idea what was going on since they were not technical. All they saw was pretty JIRA graphs and thought our team was a bunch of rockstars.
Yeah, I dig that. At the same time you'd think that a semi-competent analyst with some git chops would be able to interpret the precise crisis far easier than Random Executive Guy could re-create past event from "daily logs" and his Mark I Eyeball[1]. No one hand-flies anymore, don't see why management analysis should be the exception.
I guess, end of the day, that requirement - for daily reports - is sort of a red flag all by itself. Once they get to that point, something's borked.
[1] Oh, and his Leadership. I heard executives have that.
At my last place they wanted everyone to assign 'effort' numbers to tasks in the scrum tool, and we had to write something to generate a nag report if the weekly effort per person didn't add up to a particular number.
What happened? Well, a per-sprint task to track overhead and PTO is what happened. Which many people just added 40 hours of effort to.
Readit News
One of them got pretty tired of writing the same shit, and was like 99% sure the supervisor wasn't reading the reports, so started adding "I don't think anybody is reading these. This is a waste of my time." right above his e-mail signature.
It took over 3 months before it got noticed. Supervisor wasn't pleased, but had to admit he was right. He still required reports, but only on Fridays.
b) here's the same thing but redone as a git alias (in the [alias] section of your ~/.gitconfig). This would be invoked as `git logme`
logme = !git log --pretty=format:\"* %s\" --author `git config user.email`
I wrote some code that generated random data in the right format and people begged for it so I shared it.
Plenty of people started to create random reports, their bosses didn't give a fuck because they were pissed of as well (and wanted to use my tool as well).
The company ended up with a heap of nonsense data and I guess that someone realized that because this circus was gone after a few months.
That was in one of the largest and best known US company in the 00's, no wonder it went from a national pride to a peripheral company.
No team meetings, everyone is soloed.
Management is great.
we had a bot in our chat app, it auto asks everyone the questions 2 times daily, what did you do, what you are working etc...
The funny part about this though was that our team had amazing JIRA hygiene because we barely had any work to do (I'm not exaggerating when I say I would have about 5 hours of work a week, I would try to help other teams out but that was "stepping on other teams turf"). The teams that had the worst JIRA hygiene were the core platform teams shipping new features. Our team built internal tools so we didn't have to care about UX/scaling/etc.
Ultimately some of our team was laid off, but it made me realize upper management really had no idea what was going on since they were not technical. All they saw was pretty JIRA graphs and thought our team was a bunch of rockstars.
I guess, end of the day, that requirement - for daily reports - is sort of a red flag all by itself. Once they get to that point, something's borked.
[1] Oh, and his Leadership. I heard executives have that.
What happened? Well, a per-sprint task to track overhead and PTO is what happened. Which many people just added 40 hours of effort to.