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Renegret posted:When I was a temp at my current place two years ago, I had to hand write my time sheet and fax it to the temp company. My employer had a phone system where you had to call in and enter time over the phone, but they finally upgraded to a web app in I think like 2006. Before that if you had more than a couple codes to enter you may as well just kill yourself it will be less aggravating. Our timesheet has nowhere to enter comments on what the work was for. Answering PM questions about why I billed 6 hours to his project 6 months ago is fun.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:14
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GanjamonII posted:My employer had a phone system where you had to call in and enter time over the phone, but they finally upgraded to a web app in I think like 2006. Before that if you had more than a couple codes to enter you may as well just kill yourself it will be less aggravating. My job before the faxing time sheets job was Best Buy. It was easy because they didn't trust their employees. You open a webapp and click a button when you get in, leave for lunch, get back from lunch, and when you leave for good. The system figured the rest out, your boss approved it and you got paid. I gave the paper time sheet faxing place a pass because the temp company was made up of four people so it probably wasn't worth it for them to invest in anything fancy. HOWEVER, the web app for our time sheets at my current company confuses the hell out of me. We're a big company, bigger than best buy, but it's so god drat needlessly complicated. My information is saved in the system, it knows everything about me and what I should be doing, why do I have to enter my pay code? Why the gently caress is my paycode "////N.N//;NonExempt FT 40 -30min". There are hundreds of paycodes to choose from and half of them look like some form of "Full time, 30 minute lunch, 40 hour weeks." God forbid I choose something that's not ////N.N//; else I get a talking to from my boss and a nastygram from payroll. And of course, nothing is documented, so the only way to learn how to properly learn how to properly fill out your time card is to have someone show you. Holy poo poo, entering our 3x pay from working holidays is so confusing, it took me months to finally understand it. Just last week they introduced logic to the system that will automatically calculate OT which is a change that's years overdue. I have no idea why, up until now, I had to manually insert assorted paycodes for OT/Holidays/Sick/Personal/Vacation/Double time/Time and a half when there's a perfectly good computer system that can easily figure it out itself. I'm not exactly making up when I get paid what, there's clearly laid out rules as to what I get when. On more than one occasion my Boss caught a mistake that I missed that would've short changed me several hundred dollars of OT just because I used the wrong pay code.
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Jul 28, 2014 23:26
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Renegret posted:HOWEVER, the web app for our time sheets at my current company confuses the hell out of me. We're a big company, bigger than best buy, but it's so god drat needlessly complicated. My information is saved in the system, it knows everything about me and what I should be doing, why do I have to enter my pay code?  I've literally never heard of any so convoluted in my life. The last time I was non exempt it worked like this:*get to work, swipe badge, scan fingerprint* *go to lunch, swipe badge, scan fingerprint* *get off lunch, swipe badge, scan fingerprint* *get off work, swipe badge, scan fingerprint* The fingerprint thing annoyingly misfunctioned from time to time but that was pretty much the only thing I complained about. Paycodes? WTF?
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Jul 28, 2014 23:36
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seacat posted:
I just went back and took a look at it and it's even worse. I haven't read the columns in a while because I'm used to just copy/pasting from my previous week. It's not called a Paycode, that's something different. Paycode is used for any kind of PTO. You put that code in, and the number of hours to get paid for. Of course, there's like 20 different options that I don't know what half of them mean. The code I was referring to before is called "Transfer". What does "Transfer" mean? Hell if I know. That's what you use for time you get paid for being at work. I have to enter that twice, by the way, once before lunch, and once after. I can't think of a single situation where I'll need to be paid at one rate before lunch, and one rate after. The first time I had to do my timesheet, I was going through the Paycode option trying to figure out what "NORMAL" would be. Turns out, you're supposed to leave that blank since it's only used for special pay you didn't work hours for. Oh, and if you work a Holiday? You have to add an additional row for the same day you worked and enter two entries for that day, one for the Holiday Pay, and one for the double time for working OT. (Yes we get triple time for working holidays  ) It's not so bad once you get to know it, but holy poo poo it can be counter intuitive at times.One last thing. It's always correctly calculated your overnight differential pay automatically, so the ability to automatically crunch numbers has always been there, just unused.
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Jul 28, 2014 23:56
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Drink and Fight posted:They'll probably be poisoned. Nah, they're probably just testing some new products on employees who have been volunteered to be in their initial human trials. 
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Jul 29, 2014 01:55
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Renegret posted:And of course, nothing is documented There's two extremes of bureaucracy. One is when the ridiculously convoluted workflow is documented to such detail that you have additional and unnecessary steps. The other is when nothing is documented so no matter what you do, it's wrong. If you did it one way and all was hunky dory, it doesn't matter next time when you get chewed out even though you did it the exact same way. It's kind of like the Supreme Court and porn - "I know it when I see it" or "it's right/wrong because I Say So," only it's some loving mundane but necessary task that should NOT be this goddamn difficult. If you call someone up and they tell you how to do it, and you do it, they will tell you that you did it wrong and so you can't prove it. And if you ask for someone to clarify something in writing so you can prove it, it is akin to saying "gently caress you." Which is why you should unplug your desk phone and only correspond via email.
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Jul 29, 2014 02:06
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dennyk posted:Nah, they're probably just testing some new products on employees who have been volunteered to be in their initial human trials. 
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Jul 29, 2014 02:36
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My organisation has 100 paycodes which most people only use three. *edit* I didn't think of that at all, even thought it wasn't really us that caused the issue sbaldrick fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 15:25
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Since that was all over the news and the news named a pretty specific organization, you might not want to mention that in this thread though?
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Jul 29, 2014 15:28
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And here I am, salary exempt, just going to work and coming home (or not going to work, since I'm on paternity leave) and money magically appears in my checking account every two weeks like clockwork.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:17
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Today is move in day for our department's new location. Since we're a 24 hour location and can't stop work, half of the shift is moving poo poo and setting up while the other half works. I'm in the old office part of the skeleton crew holding things down while the new department gets everything set up. I just heard from someone that some anonymous person took a picture of our guys setting up and complained to our director that "It hasn't been one day yet and your group is already making a mess!". So basically, someone is complaining that moving is messy work. Everyone in this thread, of course, knows which side our director took. Now our guys have to move and set up equipment while avoiding any messes. This is why I volunteered to be part of the skeleton crew. e: ahahahahahahaha oh my god. I offered to work OT to be the sole person answering phones on the stipulation I don't have to wrangle tickets while they get it fixed. They just accidentally deactivated the number. I'm working OT to answer a phone with no incoming line. I'm dying here. Easiest OT in my life, I'm getting time and a half for this poo poo. Renegret fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 20:01
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I've got the worst of both worlds, I have to track my time and I'm salaried. Today I almost had a work trip I am supposed to leave for in the next couple of days canceled because a dude was worried he would not be able to handle a meeting without me. Two hours calming him down so I can go on my one-week trip without loving over a one-hour meeting.
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Jul 30, 2014 00:59
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I've been working as a contractor for a railroad for the past three years as a material planner/office manager/tech support/nurse. The company took over this shop 3 years ago, and I came on 2 months later. The office didn't exist when I started, and there was no training on anything, so I was left to figure everything out. I've created all the existing SOPs from scratch, organized and managed $3 million worth of inventory, taken care of all the shipping and receiving, issued purchase orders, and pretty much everything that doesn't involve the technical work on the locomotives. All on my own. All done with the understanding that I would be hired away from the contractor into a permanent employee. (Get it in writing!) Fast forward to this week, when the contracting company decides they're going to cancel everyone health insurance in order to "save everyone money". I'm lucky enough to have a rare genetic illness, and no health insurance is a deal breaker for me, so I tell my boss that if the company won't hire me directly, I will have to find something else. Boss says no problem, let me work on that. Final say from the people with the power to hire me? "Oh, it's not the right time, oh, it's office politics, insert favorite corporate non-committal excuse here". Okay then. Lesson learned. But it's okay, boss says, I got you a raise. $17.50/hr to run the shop, at 50+ hours a week and no benefits? No thanks. The job hunt begins. On the plus side, my resume is pretty killer because of this place.
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Jul 30, 2014 01:31
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Anthony Rapp posted:I've been working as a contractor for a railroad for the past three years as a material planner/office manager/tech support/nurse. The company took over this shop 3 years ago, and I came on 2 months later. The office didn't exist when I started, and there was no training on anything, so I was left to figure everything out. I've created all the existing SOPs from scratch, organized and managed $3 million worth of inventory, taken care of all the shipping and receiving, issued purchase orders, and pretty much everything that doesn't involve the technical work on the locomotives. All on my own. All done with the understanding that I would be hired away from the contractor into a permanent employee. (Get it in writing!) All of that and /Nurse?
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Jul 30, 2014 01:56
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Defenestration posted:All of that and /Nurse? More like "nurse". Not a real RN. I'm the go-to person when someone decides to try and lop some fingers off or give themselves a concussion.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:13
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K Prime posted:I've got the worst of both worlds, I have to track my time and I'm salaried. This is me, but I am in R&D, so I have to write internal proposals to fund myself. Anything not charged to a project goes to overhead, and we get in trouble if we charge too much.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:53
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This agency I deal with at work has an operation listserv of sort to reach all their stakeholders quickly if there's an operational issue. It's a piece of poo poo, so if you hit reply all the system will send your response to the entire group. The operation manager over there accidentally sent out a Pinterest friend request, in French, to the entire list. My inbox is blowing up with people I've never heard off complaining that it's unprofessional, requesting a translation, saying they're not interested and kindly asking people to stop replying to all. Lady hit the wrong button, people. Just delete her drat message and move on with your life.
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Jul 30, 2014 14:11
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FrozenVent posted:My inbox is blowing up with people I've never heard off complaining that it's unprofessional, requesting a translation, saying they're not interested and kindly asking people to stop replying to all. This is the best part of those email landslides. People replying to all asking everyone not to reply to all.
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Jul 30, 2014 14:32
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K Prime posted:I've got the worst of both worlds, I have to track my time and I'm salaried. Wait, there are salaried jobs that don't require time accounting? A lot of the time I charge my entire day to only one charge number/work order but some days my time card has like 10 different things on it. In both my corporate jobs so far they have stressed that not properly charging your time is grounds for immediate termination. Is it different in non-contracts based industries?
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Jul 30, 2014 16:04
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Aquatic Giraffe posted:Wait, there are salaried jobs that don't require time accounting? A lot of the time I charge my entire day to only one charge number/work order but some days my time card has like 10 different things on it. In both my corporate jobs so far they have stressed that not properly charging your time is grounds for immediate termination. No, I've always had timesheets at salaried jobs, even when not contract-based. Salaried rarely means "we totally trust you, dude!"
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Jul 30, 2014 16:08
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detectivemonkey posted:No, I've always had timesheets at salaried jobs, even when not contract-based. Salaried rarely means "we totally trust you, dude!" I love my job.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:09
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I've never had to fill out a timesheet or timecard. Our software developers have to, so their salaries can be charged to certain projects and finance does some kind magic with that information to make the numbers look better.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:19
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I haven't filled out a time sheet since, I think, 2007? If your organization can't figure out what you're doing without requiring you to enter a cost center in a time sheet, your org has bigger problems.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:31
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Volmarias posted:I haven't filled out a time sheet since, I think, 2007? How do you track overtime then? I don't think anything's wrong with a time sheet (Unless you're salaried), but I don't see why it needs to be more complicated than "Enter time you worked"
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Jul 30, 2014 16:40
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Last place I worked at that did time sheets had categories of OT for "Maintenance" and "Operations / Emergency"; tracking those sorts of makes sense for a metric perspective. Basically, if you did maintenance on a weekend, you'd get asked questions.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:42
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Time sheets aren't just about making sure you're doing something, if you work with clients/in professional services, you're usually billing them directly or indirectly based on hours worked (or how many hours they expected a project to take). I know a lawyer who has to round to the nearest 10 minutes though, which is absurd. Xandu fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 16:43
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Xandu posted:I know a lawyer who has to round to the nearest 10 minutes though, which is absurd. Pf, when I started working in a law office I was expected to track my time to tenths of an hour (so 6 minute increments). Let me tell you, six minutes is an absurdly awkward amount of time to track your day with. My time wasn't even billed directly to clients, it was just because the partner wanted to scrutinize exactly what everyone was doing at all times.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:50
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The dumbest thing was this company I worked for where we had to track our overtime (Didn't need to track our regular hours, those were assumed) in one system, then track our hours worked / hours rested in another. There's absolutely nothing in the regulations that prevent both being in the same system, these guys were just... Yeah. Still better than the place whose hours of rest record form was a giant monthly grid where you had to make a check mark in the box corresponding to every hour you'd worked in. That's one thing I don't miss from working in the field.
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Jul 30, 2014 16:55
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Xandu posted:Time sheets aren't just about making sure you're doing something, if you work with clients/in professional services, you're usually billing them directly or indirectly based on hours worked (or how many hours they expected a project to take). My first job at PFE billed in percentages per day, in 15 min increments, to a variety of different project codes for internal business-unit budgets. No time sheets at Lilly, and now I'm recording my project coverage monthly in 1-hour increments. The majority of my job is putting out fires, though, and that's lumped into one big category under "Investigation and Deviation Support." As a result, my time sheet usually has some bullshit like 2 hours here, 1 hour there, 157 hours deviation support. I keep pushing my manager to add a column for "chasing my own tail" but we're pretty sure the entire department would switch to using that one exclusively. 
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Jul 30, 2014 16:57
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Sundae posted:I keep pushing my manager to add a column for "chasing my own tail" but we're pretty sure the entire department would switch to using that one exclusively. I could probably have bought a car with all the money I made in overtime "Standing by" or "Additional manpower for safety reasons" over five years. Bought plenty of booze with the odd "At supervisor's request"* hour here and there. Unions rule. *Got woken up to get yelled at.
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Jul 30, 2014 17:01
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Ashcans posted:Pf, when I started working in a law office I was expected to track my time to tenths of an hour (so 6 minute increments). Let me tell you, six minutes is an absurdly awkward amount of time to track your day with. My time wasn't even billed directly to clients, it was just because the partner wanted to scrutinize exactly what everyone was doing at all times. From my experience the reports are never looked at. At my second last job we had our normal time sheet we had to fill out, and then an "efficiency report" we had to fill out separately to break down where our time was going. The efficiency report was this massive Excel file that I quickly realized no one used. I got pestered now and again by my supervisor that I needed to have it filled out, so I just copied week to week on a 6-8 week rotating basis.
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Jul 30, 2014 17:07
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I also track to the nearest tenth. Our time is tracked to the sub-sub-work order. As in, there's the main work order, the sub-work order, and the sub-sub-order. At least we have a mostly functional database to look everything up with.
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Jul 30, 2014 17:45
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Aquatic Giraffe posted:Wait, there are salaried jobs that don't require time accounting? A lot of the time I charge my entire day to only one charge number/work order but some days my time card has like 10 different things on it. In both my corporate jobs so far they have stressed that not properly charging your time is grounds for immediate termination. At my company, the only folks who have to track their time are people whose hours are directly billable to customers, who are contractors that we pay by the hour (and for those folks it's just "when did you work"), or who are on some sort of disciplinary thing where it makes sense (I had one guy do timesheets a few months as part of a PIP for being late all the time). I really hate having to micromanage people like that, though.
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Jul 30, 2014 19:43
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Renegret posted:How do you track overtime then? I phrased that poorly. If your time is getting billed to customers, or you work hourly, you definitely need a time sheet and that makes sense. My rhetorical question was why you would need to fill one out if you're salaried, don't get overtime, and your supervisor nominally knows what you're doing.
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Jul 30, 2014 19:46
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Volmarias posted:I phrased that poorly. If your time is getting billed to customers, or you work hourly, you definitely need a time sheet and that makes sense. My rhetorical question was why you would need to fill one out if you're salaried, don't get overtime, and your supervisor nominally knows what you're doing. Because there is no way a supervisor has an accurate hourly estimate for how long everyone that is under him spends on tasks. It also keeps a record of how long something actually took to complete and thus can be used as a basis for estimates.
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Jul 30, 2014 19:54
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Volmarias posted:I phrased that poorly. If your time is getting billed to customers, or you work hourly, you definitely need a time sheet and that makes sense. My rhetorical question was why you would need to fill one out if you're salaried, don't get overtime, and your supervisor nominally knows what you're doing. The answer to that is Corporate Expensing. Your company likely has multiple departments, and each activity they do is considered a cost. They are each given a microscopic budget and told to work magical wonders with it. Each department is likely held responsible for its individual budget, and that includes hours worked for any given project. Because of this, any time spent on anything that isn't directly related to your work, you have to keep good tabs on or you effectively blow your magical work-hours budget on other people's stuff. Then, you get reamed for failing to adhere to budget while the guy you helped gets praised for coming in under budget, even though you all work for the same goddamned company. For example, if I work on an investigation, my time technically gets charged against Manufacturing Operations. If I'm on the floor supporting validation batches, it goes against Process Validation and Impact Analysis Group. If I'm stuck in meetings revising SOPs, it depends on who owns the SOP. If I pull in help on editing a 3,000-page qualification report, the hours that person provides get charged against my department's project cost. That sort of thing. It's a big, stupid budgeting game where employees are all expenses and we can't possibly be providing any value in anything we do. Sundae fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 19:57
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asur posted:Because there is no way a supervisor has an accurate hourly estimate for how long everyone that is under him spends on tasks. It also keeps a record of how long something actually took to complete and thus can be used as a basis for estimates.  Yeah, stupid me. I've forgotten a time when anyone wanted an hour by hour estimate of what I've done. I'm too used to doing projects that take days or weeks, or referring to tickets by name. Nevermind!
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Jul 30, 2014 20:10
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I've worked for three major, global companies. At no time have I ever had to fill out a time card or report my hours to anyone. This discussion is foreign to me, except for those contracting or working on projects for other business units. I could be assigned to work with ops, finance, IT, etc. and it wouldn't matter, I don't need to account for hours.
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Jul 30, 2014 20:18
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I won't say everything that's going on in my job right now, but we are effectively crippled right now. No timesheets, very little work can get done, nothing can be bought or sold and no information can be retrieved for an indeterminant amount of time. We have basically gone back to operating in the pre-computer error.
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Jul 30, 2014 20:23
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sbaldrick posted:I won't say everything that's going on in my job right now, but we are effectively crippled right now. No timesheets, very little work can get done, nothing can be bought or sold and no information can be retrieved for an indeterminant amount of time. Failed a computer systems validation?
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Jul 30, 2014 20:40
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