The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Funny how enterprise software never seemed to be installed on the Enterprise itself

The Corporate Overlords have recently changed the time tracking system. The previous one was, I think, developed in house and all things considered, wasn't that bad. The new one, not developed in house (perhaps because “code is a liability” or tax differences between opex and capex—somebody got a bonus I'm sure) can be best described as not being that good.

The new system, a third party, “enterprise class” time tracking application via the web (of course), doesn't respond well if you enter the data too fast. And one of the fields that's a “pull-down” list of items takes forever to load, no matter how many entries you make—it never gets faster.

But today I learned about another limitiation. Due to COVID-19, I haven't taken any vacation time, and because of the quarantine, I haven't been sick either. So I have all this time accrued up that I now have to use (yeah, I know, first world problems). But there is no way to request a single block of time off with the new time tracking application. No, you have to enter … each … vacation … day … one … day … at … a … time.

So it's select the day, wait a bit for the popup window to appear, select category, wait a bit while all the categories load, select “absent,” wait a bit for the sub-categories to load, select “Paid Time Off,” select out of that field to make sure it takes, select the “reason” field, wait a bit, select “other” (because the only other selection is “sick”), select out of that field to make sure that takes, be glad that the “time” field is pre-filled out with 8 hours, but wait until the popup stops resizing itself, then hit “Okay,” and wait until that takes. And then do it again for the next day. Then once the week is filled out, hit “Submit,” wait a bit until the next page comes up, and hit “Done” to do the actual submission. And then do all that again for the next week. Repeat until done.

I just wish the executives responsible for selecting this “enterprise solution” were themselves subject to it, but alas, they have secretaries, so we mere employees are subject to this craziness.

But as my manager said, “at least you get paid to do that.” Yeah, there is that.

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