When Management Refused to Hire IT Help Without Extreme Time-Tracking, He Followed Their Rule So Strictly It Backfired
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Trying to prove you’re overworked should never be part of the job.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly where this IT employee found himself after his manager claimed the team’s workload didn’t justify hiring more help.
But rather than listening to his employees, the manager pointed to the numbers and insisted they weren’t tracking enough of their time.
So the employee decided to document every single minute of his day.
When his manager saw the outcome, he quickly changed his mind about the new policy.
Read on to see how it all played out.
Manager complained that I wasn’t tracking enough of my time
Around 10 years ago, I was working for an IT company that supported many small- to medium-sized businesses in the area. Many of our customers paid a monthly fee for us to be available for phone-based support.
We didn’t bill for this time because it was included in their contracts.
I was working on salary and was way overworked because of bad management practices, frequently putting in 12- to 16-hour days. Management knew this.
He tried to talk to management, but they wouldn’t listen.
When I tried to explain to management that we needed more help because I was beyond burnt out, my manager stated that he couldn’t justify the extra help because our numbers didn’t show exactly how overworked we were.
In fact… based on my ticket tracking, I was only putting in 7–8 hours a day.
Is that so? From that point on, I decided that every minute of my day would be tracked.
Time could only be tracked in 5-minute increments. And we were told to track our time-tracking time against our own company.
No matter what was going on, he tracked the time against the customer.
Five minutes on the phone with a customer? That got ticketed and entered into the time system. But I spent 5 minutes dealing with the time/ticket system, so that also got tracked.
Another call? 10 minutes. Five-minute ticket against us for time tracking.
Twenty minutes driving to a customer site? Tracked against the customer. Five minutes against us.
I ended up frequently entering dozens of things per day. Everyone on the team started doing this. It was a small team of three, but the tickets all added up quickly.
When he got backed up, the manager began to complain.
What’s important to note is that every time we submitted a ticket or a time entry, the boss also got an entry in the system that he had to review and approve. If he had to read the tickets and approve them, it would have taken most of a day just to approve everything. Then he could go about his normal day.
But he didn’t do this daily. He frequently waited a few days or even a week before approving stuff.
This meant that by the time he went into the system, he had **hundreds** of things to approve.
He came to complain about the sheer volume of tickets and said he’d spent his entire weekend in the crummy ticket system just approving everything.
Before long, they went back to the old system.
We pointed out that this was exactly what he’d asked for.
He asked us to go back to the old way. And then we still couldn’t justify our need for more help.
I left the company shortly afterward because I was tired of being paid a pittance for skilled labor. Within three months, the rest of the team had quit. The company was sold, and that department no longer exists.
At this point… not my monkeys, not my circus.
Wow! The manager really should’ve thought that one through.
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Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit think about it.
This could be true.
It sure sounds like it anyway.
Here’s the perspective of a fellow IT guy.
Some companies really don’t think things through very well.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a customer who still asked for a manager after receiving perfect service.
Well, that’s one way to find out what your employees have been trying to tell you all along.
The manager wanted more numbers, so that’s exactly what he got.
Unfortunately, he never stopped to think about how much extra work those numbers would create for everyone, including himself.
Maybe next time he’ll remember that the people doing the job usually have a much better idea of what the workload looks like than a spreadsheet does.
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