Well, very situational question. My question here is mostly, what are the bad incentives caused when people time track their days for example in with 1 hour or 0,5 hour granularity with software development tasks? I have been doing that kind of tracking both professionally and in personal projects, and I don't see the harm caused.
Personally the software development tasks I have been doing are quite often separable in tasks that take several hours. Sometimes there are tasks that take days without clear separation.
I think asking whether it is discuss "whether you did line this amount of lines within X hours" is more like management and workplace culture than software development issue. It seems that people here are fed up with their managers and funnel that bad feeling against time tracking. In my opinion time tracking is valuable tool and should be used in principle almost everywhere. Bad managers of course make any type of work a pain.
> Time however is a really really bad measure of productivity.
Situationally. With programming there are loads of different tasks. For some tasks I think time can be quite a good metric. Still, metrics matter and I think having lousy metrics is better than not having metrics at all. Of course you have to realize what purpose the metric has in certain situation.
I don't follow how that is related to time tracking.
I have used time tracking for personal projects and also professionally and I genuinely think that it can add value to my workflow, in a way that I can analyze how much I spend on certain tasks etc.
I would guess also painters and script writers track quite often track their time. I think some level of time tracking is good for almost any level of work. For example, if your goal is to produce paintings and sell them for living, you probably want to know how long does it take for you to produce something so you can see if you are approaching sustainability. Similarly if you write movie or tv scripts it is probably relevant whether it takes 2 months to write the script or 2 years. Some work is just structurally different so different approaches to time tracking make sense.
> I'd imagine the smart developers quickly get replaced by the obedient clock-punchers.
I have never understood why the clock-punching is so a big problem. It doesn't take much time to track your time spent with typical softare, in my experience. And apparently being clock-puncher now makes you dumb as well?
I have personally also tracked time on my personal projects. While not sure if it does bring much value, it is not a huge investment time-wise.
Personally I don't really see why following some quite common work schedule like 8:30 - 16:30 and having daily stand-up meetings destroy morale. Of course depends on the details, but my life has always been quite nice following standard work styles. Time tracking is a chore that not many like, but still it takes in my experience only 15 minutes or so from the daily time and IMO produces pretty good value.