The pay/time tracking system is very annoying and stressful. I'm salaried, but each day I have to enter how many hours I spent on different tasks. Each task has an associated "charge number", the identifier which you input to say how many hours you've worked on that task.
That's all fine, until you don't have enough tasks to really fill your day, you end up charging more to certain tasks than the time it actually takes. That can cause certain tasks or programs to go over budget. Management is in charge of finding tasks for their employees, but they're not that great at keeping the schedule full (understandably, it's hard to predict labor time).
So it can be stressful showing up to work when you don't have a number to charge to. What do you do? Well you have to talk to your manager to find a task, or other managers, or you go home and use vacation time. Which is a terrible system.
It's all because the government requires this micromanaging of employee scheduled to work on government contracts, so it's the nature of companies in this industry, which is unfortunate.
Also, this site is experiencing a difficult business environment currently, so there's been lots of layoffs and not a lot of work to go around.
