Okay, I could have been the greatest salesman in the world if someone would provide me something worth selling.  Something that made life easier and automated or at least eased the pain of something that I was having to do all the time anyways.  My rant today involves time keeping software which for this session we’re going to call ClockMe.  Now ColckMe is web based and is basically an online time sheet.  The premise is that you log in from any internet enabled device and submit your time, your manager receives an email and clicks the link from his computer, tablet, cell phone and approves or declines the time and then the time is downloaded into the payroll system.  Short sweet and comes with a happy ending (a paycheck people, minds out of the gutter).  Let’s take a look at how bad programmers spoil happy endings…

Now ClockMe is built on PostGre SQL and is written in Python and hosted on Rack Space.  That’s three hits for me, I’m not paying a Microsoft or Oracle surtax and Rack Space is well rated.  I love open source and dependability.  That’s where this love affair ends.  After you log on the world gets really, really dark…

Let’s start from the beginning, I need to enter my time.  I log in and get to my time sheet:

My time is based on in/out – lunch – in/out and that is this entry screen:
[show how bad tab stops are]

And then there is how the time should be allocated, ideally if the employee is smart we give them access to pick their assignment, under no circumstances do you let them pick their pay type.
[show manual pay type allocation]

Now if you are doing different assignments throughout your week, odds are you have different overlords you report to for those different assignments.  This system treats every employee as they only report to one ‘approval process’ so you can only have a single manager approving time for all assignments:
[Show how this is a pain to deal with]

Group and roll selection is as bad if not worse than any program I’ve ever seen.  I’ve got 200 groups in my list and they show me 10 and I have to go through the whole thing making sure I remember to hold control to select them.  This isn’t bad programming this is sadistic.
[Screen shot of the abomination]

Manager logins, you should never include a character in your usernames that would make someone have to select it, a double click should render the username completely copyable.  Now this may have been done by us but I’m not sure why they would allow for user names like that.