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How Do You Punch In?
grantedparole asks: "My company is planning to switch from an antiquated punch card time clock to a software based time clock, and a recent search on Google yielded many results. Searching on Freshmeat for 'timeclock' yielded two results, both of which do not appear to have any recent updates. Searching for 'time clock' returned more results, but all of those seem geared towards project management, rather than real world time keeping for many employees who don't work on projects (ie: sales people). What are the people on Slashdot using and is it running on *nix?"
Do employers trust employees anymore?
I can understand having a clock in some environments, but I dont see the need for a clock in the typical Office Space style workplaces. My own timesheet doesn't even ask for times, just the total hours worked for each day and for what contract. My supervisor signs the sheet at the end of the week, and I feel it's more than sufficient. If someone feels that there's some tampering or other shenanigans going on, there are ways to figure that out. Like when they're work doesn't get done, or keeping tabs on when they actually show up and leave the office.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
We use Kronos timecard at my place of employment, and I can tell you - catagorically - that it is a big peice of shit.
Every time you want to login or log out, gotta wait for the java plugin to load, also it has problems refreshing the timecard after you JUST PUNCHED causing many employees to punch duplicates because it shows they didn't. The interface is bad on so many levels. God, I hate it.
The only place I ever worked that had a flexi-time system and therefore needed clocking on systems used little mechanical clocks, one for each person which could only be switched on or off with a key. Unfortuantely, it was eventually found that a fault in these clocks made them a fire risk, and as the manufacturer had gone out of business they couldn't easily be replaced.
The management toyed with going for a software-based system, but this was unpopular with the staff as it was felt that the time it would take to boot up one's PC in the morning, logon to the mainframe (this was a while back!) and navigate to the timesheets system would cause, cumulatively, a lot of time to be lost to the staff's flexi-time accounts. There was also the issue of the system forwarding late clock-ons to Personnel (what we used to call HR back in the day), which again could have been unfair as you could have arrived on the premises on time, but might not be able to "clock on" for another five minutes before the hardware and software let you.
In the end, we just went to a paper-based system which worked fine.
I'm an engineer, and have worked in two shops which used time sheets for project tracking. The first one (a little place where the Dilbert factory approached unity) had about a gazillion categories in which to log time, with sub-categories and sub-sub-categories galore. Most people ended up putting in "40 hours misc" every week. The really conscientious ones might have actually broken that down by project. The numbers, of course, became gospel for estimation of future projects.
The second place had a bit better idea how a tracking system should be run, but a piss-poor implementation. The hours had to be manually logged into their "timeclock" program, which was slow and buggy. Later they went to an web-browser client that was even worse, taking 30-60 seconds just to move from one field to the next! The engineers actually rebelled against it, refusing to enter any times at all. And guess what? Turns out nobody really noticed...
BTW, at the first place I decided to track my own hours the right way. I found a program that let me define my own categories. Click a category and time automatically started accumulating until you clicked something else. (I think it was called 'timex' or 'xtime', circa 1990.) I set up a category for each of my projects, without all the extraneous crap the regular program had. I also set up a few categories for different sorts of interruptions. I used this program pretty religiously for about a year, and was kind of disturbed to find that only about 30% of my time was going into actual budgeted projects. Everything else was off-topic. I haven't tracked time as closely anywhere else, but subjectively it seems that this 30% figure is pretty universal.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.