Or: Every Developer Gets an Amex
How often does this happen where you work:
- Developer begs, pleads with boss to go to technical conference
- Boss negotiates with developer on getting a cheaper hotel. (It’s only $69 a night! Clean sheets optional. 30 minute bus ride from conference. What a steal!)
- Boss orders developer to get cheaper, three stop flight instead of more expensive non-stop
- Developer attends conference
- Developer returns from conference with a pile of low value receipts ($20 for lunch, $40 for cab to airport)
- Developer spends two hours painstakingly scanning each receipt and constructs a spreadsheet with itemized list of charges
- Boss approves charges without even looking at them
- goto 1
How brain-dead is this? Here you have a highly-paid software developer doing super-low value data entry. It probably cost you $200 to have them enter all this junk.
What does this tell the developer?
- I don’t trust you
- Scanning receipts is more valuable than writing awesome code
- Your time is not particularly valuable
- I don’t trust you
Give the developer a corp Amex, ask them to be a responsible adult, and be done with it. Have them forward receipts (where applicable) to a specific email address to satisfy potential IRS complications. The end.
Anything else is over-optimization of a low-probability event (being audited and needing to justify a latte at the airport).
Update
I recently stubled across this blog post that beautifully illustrates this!
Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 60. She explained that my travel reimbursement process was simple: I’d just hand her the receipts after my trip, she’d fill out the necessary forms, submit them to the university, and within a month, the reimbursement check would magically appear in my department mailbox.
…
But over time the department grew, and Joann moved on. The university partnered with Concur, as corporations do, forcing us to file our own travel reimbursements through this system. Fine, I thought, more work for me, but it can’t be too bad. But, the department also appointed a staff member to audit our Concur submissions.
This person’s job wasn’t to help us file reimbursements, but to audit the forms to find errors. Slowly but surely, it became routine for every single travel submission to be returned (sometimes multiple times) for minor format irregularities or rule violations. These were petty violations no human would care about if the goal were simply to get people reimbursed. The experience degraded from effortless to what could be perceived as adversarial.
This was a massive downgrade from the Joann era.