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Side projects are fine, we had 20% rule for own projects, but put it on hold for 1 year to reach our product goals (product is not growing as fast as it should). So this practice will return soon. It seems he is not ready to wait for several more months though...

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You seem to be saying that the project is not moving forward quickly enough because the developer doesn't work enough.

Are you sure the management / communication / teamwork is not the problem ? You may be setting expectations at the level that cannot be reached with your current team and management. Maybe you should set easier targets so that everybody stays motivated after reaching said targets.

Problems are everywhere as in every other company. We have flat hierarchy, no middle management and almost nobody above developers. They do all technical decisions and decide how to implement features. Features are selected by Product board and developers have little influence here.

That might be a core problem right there. There's no developer influence in product meetings? While on the business end there might be a need for a feature, business people are not going to understanding what complexities are involved in a particular feature. What you might think takes a day could take 3 weeks. On the other hand, you may be passing over useful features you think are complex but only take a day. If you trust your developers with as much as you say you do, they should have a voice in your meetings. That may be a way to retain this lead developers interest

I'm sure others will comment on the fact that 1 year sounds really long to the average developer. Not really because 365 days is unreasonable (though in some cases it might be), but because it symbolically sounds like BS. It sounds like the company is in economic trouble or that you will "have a change of plans' and postpone the 20% rule in the months to come. Either way, that doesn't make a very motivated team.

I read your comment of only requiring 40 hour work weeks. That shows you're aware, I wish more employers had that outlook.

This may not be popular, but I think you do need to make an exception to the rule, while maintaining it for the other 49.

People will understand if the the Lead Developer has "research projects" that stay undefined. It might even accidentally inspire some to want to be the Lead Developer.

There is an obvious hidden assumption that 20% rule results in a productivity decrease, which is true for coal mining or agricultural harvest work, but not so much for software development.

A bit less water cooler time talking about sports to avoid something boring, a bit less HN time, combined with fresh new perspectives and new techniques and new ideas can easily result in a net productivity gain. If as per other posts you do strict 40/wk then we all know that at 4:45pm most folks are stalling till 5 so if you officially let him whip out a book on cool new technology you've lost exactly nothing while gaining quite a bit for free. Only a madman or a fool would "start something big" 15 minutes before going home and you claim he's skilled so we can assume nothing of huge importance would be lost by whipping out a book at 4:45pm. Or on the other side of the clock we all know time is spent spinning up, some folks delete emails, some gossip or talk, if he spins up by reading "cool new tech book" or fooling around in another language for 15 minutes to get into the flow, again, you've lost nothing while gaining quite a bit.

Get there faster by going slower, kind of thing. If you're lost in the woods, running as fast as you can just makes you die tired, so slow down.

If it is just grunt manual labor like data entry, then it is probably too boring to be fixed under any circumstances, but you claim in other posts to never hire juniors etc so by your own definition you can't be that bad... probably.

That sounds like you've then signaled that you expect the team to be in crunch mode for a year, I'd certainly start looking for a new job in this scenario.

Our crunch mode is 40 hrs work week, no overtimes.

" So this practice will return soon. It seems he is not ready to wait for several more months though..."

I think that your idea of "soon" is very different from the rest of the world.

To bring the 20% rule back takes 1 minute: one email sent to everybody that says just that.

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