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Lots of comments on the effectiveness of a 20% policy - I'm curious what other folks experience is like with an internal hack day? It seems that if a company's culture isn't suitable for 20% time (for whatever reason), that an internal hack day might be a useful alternative (scratching developer itches but not "wasting" 20% of developer time on non-core projects). Any insight/recommendations from anyone who's done this?

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We do an internal hack day modeled after Atlassian ShipIt (or as they called it and we do 'Fedex Day'). We've only had two since we started (year and a half) but aim to have one per quarter or every other quarter.

In our experience, they were a major boost to morale and some really interesting ideas came out of them, several of which have been implemented fully in our core products.

I'm a big advocate for these. We couldn't really pull off 20% but giving developers opportunities to work on their ideas within the company is really important.

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