this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!
The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it "takes longer", inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they're doing stuff to justify their existence.
Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.
The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren't tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn't matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.
I even took it a step further and didn't really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules... If someone needed to run an errand or "telework" for a day; fine by me. The company didn't give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.
Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I'm too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn't happen. I'm moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.
Compounding this, when it's that busy, I'm often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I'm off trying to chip away at something else. When it's slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it's easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it's busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05.... Yeah, I'm not entering all that time... At best I'm going to guess, at worst I'm just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: "fixed problem" done.
The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I'm too busy trying to put out fires, I don't care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.
This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn't just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I'm not putting out a fire instead I'm taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.
I dunno Sally, why don't you fucking Google it? I'm not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that's not broken. I'm currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I'll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my "attitude" towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp's file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally's feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn't meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I'm lead technician on that account.
Fuck.