What happened when a software company stopped working for a week | Hacker News Reader

What happened when a software company stopped working for a week

blog.businessofsoftware.org

34 pointsbensummers20 comments

Rather than write up the results, here’s a video that Anthony put together.

WTF? Some of us are busy and would love a quick write-up. Not everyone is a teen that can spend all day watching YouTube videos. Hell, some of us work places where we can't even see the video if we wanted to!

You're kind of darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don't with content creation for certain audiences: text is rarely remarkable because it is quickly consumed and (if you're lucky) maybe retweeted, which produces nearly no value for the business. Video is harder to duplicate and might actually attract some links, and is easier to consume for the average Internet user than text is (oh goodness, if you collect stats on online attention you might as well start popping Prozac now), but it doesn't fly with the group that wants to get in and out of your article in 45 seconds or less.

Decisions, decisions.

audio + digital dictation = text?

Just a suggestion.

Why a video with no summary? (I don't want to view a video, unless it really advances the point)

I agree. Does anyone have time to watch and give us a summary here on HN?

If you don't have time, then why are you on HN?

Summary: Instead of doing normal work they let teams work on a new project that they wanted to work on.

Everybody has the same amount of time. It's about priority. Not many want to watch a 10 min video.

I don't watch video because reading is much better suited for a family setting since I don't have to make noise or totally tune out with headphones.

Basically, everyone worked on either internal tools (better reporting for testers, etc.) or new initiatives ("SQL Pony" or some such). Plus they fooled around some and made a video.

So not really a "down tools" week as much as it is a "work on something tangentially related to work (with your tools) and have a little fun" week.

So they really didn't stop working for the week. They just re-focused on some of the things they should have been doing all along in order to make development easier. Everyone seems to forget that tools and infrastructure should come first.

Because they shouldn't - at least not in the early stages.

Once you know what you're making, shipping product comes first through about fiftieth. If tools get you on the shortest path to shipping product then do that, but ship.

It's Jobs' biggest contribution to theory. Real artists ship.

If you don't know what you're making, or should make next - which is a real challenge for big companies - then what RedGate do (and they're an awesome company) makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I tried that. Didn't work.

So what was the result/conclusion?

This idea always struck me as a little childish. Do developers who are creative enough to make useful tools need to be constrained to some one-week window in which it's allowed to do so?

No, but in the real world of deadlines, collaboration with teams that have their own different schedules, priorities, etc., they very often need a one week window not constrained but instead opened such that they can actually get something done about items in the important but not urgent quadrant.

Red Gate's doing a bang up PR job.

A easy takeaway for me from the video was that people are more productive when they work on things that interest them. This just makes sense.

What was interesting to me is that it wasn't as much of Google's famous "20%" concept. All they highlighted were people working on new commercial products that they wouldn't have had the freedom or option to build in the normal course of their jobs. There didn't appear to be diversity in scope or direction.

i would hardly say they "stopped working", yeah?

this really does look like a recruiting video -- nerf guns? check. balloons floating away into the blue, blue sky? check. generic downtempo house musak? check. "why do i like working at redgate"? check.

they also all look really tired and i would too if my "fun week off" was compromised of building a "object-level recovery tool for sharepoint".

This must be part of their recruitment drive[1]. I guess something like this is necessary when it's so hard to get excited about your company's products.[2]

[1]http://www.red-gate.com/careers/free_ipad.htm [2]http://www.red-gate.com/products/index.htm

It's worth watching the video - if you [maukdaddy: "work places where we can't even see the video if we wanted to"] then don't watch it - you'll just get very jealous because you'll have no hope of getting your organisation to do anything remotely this good.

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