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I would take a different approach to reach a similar conclusion.

Assign a task to a junior dev.

- Efficient: copies blindly a solution from stackoverflow in 30 minutes

- Inefficient: copies the same solution but tries to understand it before committing it, taking 90 minutes.

The inefficient lad is on his path to become a senior engineer. :)

There's always a trade-off between exploration/exploitation - in any optimization, we're incapable of enumerating every path to our intended goal or the associated cost. We need some time to experiment, fail and learn - and ultimately discover a more optimal pathway.

I guess that's the motivation behind Google's 20% time (if that was/is ever a thing).

I'd also be interested to know how Amazon approaches the problem. From the outside, they look like a much more top-down organization than Google - keen to hear if/how that gels with "encouraging experimentation and failure".

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