What is the company size where you think a 20% policy like this matters? Does it only make sense for large companies like Google?
Thank you for your take on these questions, your answer would be very much appreciated.
Thank you for your take on these questions, your answer would be very much appreciated.
For smaller companies it's easy to essentially always have feature work which means never really having time for code health; anything that wasn't done right the first time will be hard pressed to justify getting done ever unless it's either breaking something or preventing features. 20% time can allow engineers to do something about issues they see and care about which could improve things for everyone else in a way "one more feature" may not.
And then we do a Feature Friday so folks can work on the fun new stuff (of their choice). It's all company project related tho - sometimes loosely - we don't yet have a business case for AR/VR or using templates on a Remarkable 2 - but maybe - and they are used to spread knowledge around the team
Besides startups, I think it's fair play at companies of all sizes. Employees are the most important thing to companies, and the overhead of losing trained, context-carrying talent tends to be heavy. So, why not let them fulfill that scratch and keep them at your company.
I've seen some companies allow 20% on any team within the company (rather than any project whatsoever): that could be a nice middleground for a company that is unsure about the whole thing.
Let smart people do what they want.
That was until my boss flipped his shit one day and wanted me to memorize a bunch of shit in my down time.
So instead of automating 6 figure Engineering jobs, I did what everyone else does on their slow Time. Facebook!
There were three segments with sizeable viewer counts at the time: sports, video games, and social streams. The people streaming sports probably didn’t have the necessary permission from the copyright holders, so that was only possible through the DMCA safe-harbor provisions; obtaining the rights ourselves didn’t appear to be a viable option.
The entire company basically split into two divisions: the social division turned into SocialCam, which had some moderate success, and the gaming division turned into Twitch.
It's impossible at a company if you haven't built your main product yet so I'm not sure how it could work at a startup.
I worked in a larger technology/shared services team where the execs set an expectation of “no email Friday” policy and encouraged peer learning and training on Friday afternoons.
It wasn’t 100% effective, but helped establish a personal development culture, got SMEs talking outside their “turf” and sparked a few good projects and staff transitions. (We discovered we had a change management guy who was passionate about kubernetes)
When I first started with the company I used the time to gain experience using the products we make. That gave me more insight into our user's perspectives and paid dividends in future tasks like bug fixing.
Sometimes people use the time for small things that they want to add but aren't important enough to be scheduled. I work with people that are passionate about what we do so it's nice to be able to make improvements in the spots we care about.
Sometimes people will use the time to throw together a proof of concept for a bigger feature. The real feature might take months to get working to the point where it is stable and polished enough for an end user but you can get a lot of management buy in if you have something tangible that can show people what the feature could do.
Generally, if your manager is not shit and not under unusual time pressure, they should have no problem with a project that doesn't significantly impact the primary work and has some chance of benefiting the company.
Google is interesting as they have an explicit 20% policy, but in practice it doesn't really matter one way or another.
In our case, everyone worked on the same project, so it was either develop some new features for the existing project, or create something brand new. We would develop some POC, and every time the answer by management was "that's cool, but we don't have the resources to polish it up/bring it to market and it's low priority". It was pretty depressing to me.