The Long Con Of The Corporate Timesheet

The company already wrote your hours off so the only question left is who gets to spend them.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

There’s a sweet spot to be found when working the Grand Game of Software Engineering, deep in the corporate grist mill, dodging the great thumping machines of management, the suffocating miasmic atmosphere of process (particularly agile), and the sanity eviscerating treadmill of “career” through performance reviews, SMART goals, and 1–1 meetings.

And, it’s genuinely hard to find. In fact you might not even know it’s there for a while as you enter the company doors for the first time and a bright eyed and bushy tailed neophyte developer thinking that you’ll be working on exciting projects, with highly technical individuals, and that you’ll be changing the world.

You won’t, of course, and I’m sorry to burst your bubble. And, if you’ve been in the game for even a small amount of time you’ll probably still be laughing about that “changing the world” bit too.

Oh, it does happen, of course, sometimes, but only in very, very small niches as the vast majority of the corporate desert of ineptitude revolves around paying us engineering types as little as possible, for as much boring, banal, grunt work as possible, whilst standing in the way of us actually doing anything interesting or innovative by not letting us have a say in any decisions whatsoever.

Often, to work on the interesting things you’ll either have to be working 100 hour weeks, sleeping under your desk, and be paid in equity. Or you’ll just have to be very, very good at what you do, have someone in management actually recognise that, and occupy your niche. Build your moat, try to make things better for your fellow engineers, and do it all without falling into the trap of taking the management coin and the inevitable technical lobotomy that follows.

Ergo, for the vast majority of software types, time will primarily be spent enduring process, attending pointless meetings, arguing about how long a story point should be, and making up convincing enough “SMART” goals that you think will be robust enough to survive HR interrogation and, ultimately, rebuttal.

If you have “the spark” as I like to call it, i.e. you’re a curious¹, intelligent engineer with knowledge of the fundamentals of computer science, and not a copy/pasting “vibe” coder or generic “web guy” (or even an “ex-A, ex-B, ex-C” CV padder who just wants to be a “Thought Leader” on LinkedIn and sell “free” ebooks and courses because you can’t code for toffee), then you’ll often get very, very bored at work.

Often you’ll have realised that finishing something early won’t result in elevation of status, or more money, it’ll just end up with you doing more work and everyone else doing less. You’ll survive, for a while, sure, but unless someone notices you, and you can get a niche, you’ll either lose your mind and become a permanent fixture, or just end up quitting.

The key thing to realise is that everything, when you’re going through the motions of being a “valuable member of the team” (whilst you’re just waiting to move on), is transitory. You’re just pretending. You have to accept that for long periods of time you’ll be pretending to work, going through the aforementioned motions, and padding time.

So, you have to do something useful with it.

Some people give it to the company, they work to get ahead, they make PowerPoints for management, they bring in the pizzas on “free” pizza Friday, they might even arrange the chairs in the meeting room.

Others try to do a better job, refine their code, make things faster or more efficient, do 100x the work when 0.5x will do. Thing is, remember where you are, no-one will notice and no-one will care, with the caveat from earlier.

But the optimum way is just to better yourself. Spend time learning the things that you want to do, not the things that you’re doing that are boring, as you’ll look like you’re working and you’ll actually be getting something out of it yourself, rather than the company getting yet another thing out of you.

Maybe tool up on a new language, work on your “side hustle²”, do something that will further yourself, your life, and whatever you want to do rather than just sitting there going through the motions, staring at the screen in sadness, or helping a project manager with yet another PowerPoint³.

We all do it, we just don’t talk openly about it.

It’s a bit like companies say never to talk about salary, “disciplinary action” and all that, but often we’re comparing percentages the day after the yearly handout of crumbs from the boardroom table.

Often companies move at a glacial pace, and I really do personally believe that’s down to management density, literally, and generally size. Projects go slowly by design, billable hours have to be maximised, and process has to rule because the consultants and agile evangelists say so.

You can’t change that on your own, so you go find a startup or a smaller one (though that also often doesn’t work for reasons I’m going to go more deeply into in a future article), to work fully and at speed, or you accept how things are and use the slack time (no, not Slack, slack), to further your own interests.

And that, in the end, is the long con of the corporate timesheet. The hours on it were always fiction — the company pads them to maximise the billable and keep the project limping along, and you sign off on them because that’s the game everyone agreed to play. So, just this once, pad them in your own favour. Bill the dead time to yourself, not to them.

Loyalty doesn’t pay the bills.

[1]: In a good way and not in an IT request to “scan your hard drive” kind of way. [2]: I do hate to use that expression, as your 9–5 should be your “side hustle”, it’s a bit like it’s life/work balance rather than HR’s favourite of work/life balance, or my personal favourite of working “with” someone and never “for” them. Start as you mean to go on, and all that. [3]: Slide, of course.