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Making 20% Time Work

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Re: Making 20% Time Work

#71

Post by jupiter90000 »

thebouv wrote: post #34

There are IT departments inside of non-IT companies that would love to have this sort of luxury. But with department heads that would have their heads explode if you try to explain this to them. sigh

Also, slightly off topic, but for similar reasons I can't figure out why bosses want IT workers that mostly sit at their desk on a computer to work at the office (instead of remote locations) for a full 40+ a week. It's like there is distrusting management who thinks if they didn't walk the hallways once per week at random and see people staring at their computers then the same work wouldn't happen. Let these people work alot more wherever they want if their work isn't location dependent.

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#72

Post by lquist »

codeonfire wrote: post #54

How to make 20% time: Just do it. Don't tell anyone. Tell that asshole trying to control your work to fuck off. When you've got something, tell the right people about it. Watch the other assholes at your job trip over themselves as they trash your work that you already got buy in from from the right people. Publish it. Launch it. Put it on your resume. You'll probably get fired because the assholes will resent that y…

Zed, is that you?

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#73

Post by isoos »

There are many, slightly different ways to describe innovation.

I have found that 20% of the time project is about personal motivation to show on something different (than my usual tasks) that I can do it or make it better. Managers only need to enable it, and shall not force it. If the individual is not motivated to show that it can do better, let it be, because they may be just fine with their normal work.

Groups working on things together for a week (~yearly 20% time) is more about exploring the team's creativity, exploring business or product ideas. It can be called internal pitch or demo days.

Some ideas need time to get some exploring, some trial and error, some fiddling, some long discussions, and may not be doable in a week (wall clock time). Due to their different nature, they will result in different products.

I have written a couple of other points that are related about product development (e.g. moonshot, 10X, competitions), you may find them useful:

https://drillio.com/en/2016/best-practices-in-product-develo...

Re: article. I think the author is using the 20% projects as a team building exercise. It could be working for that purpose, and maybe for some incremental changes, but will not explore innovative ideas.

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#74

Post by codeonfire »

preordained wrote: post #66
codeonfire wrote: post #54

How to make 20% time: Just do it. Don't tell anyone. Tell that asshole trying to control your work to fuck off. When you've got something, tell the right people about it. Watch the other assholes at your job trip over themselves as they trash your work that you already got buy in from from the right people. Publish it. Launch it. Put it on your resume. You'll probably get fired because the assholes will resent that y…

Rinse and repeat? I could be missing something, but are we saying we should adopt the mentality that we are too good for any job we might find ourselves in? It sounds a bit arrogant to automatically assume that what you've chosen to divert your attention to has merit, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an asshole... I could be misreading, but your tone seems to veer more towards self-centeredness than empowerment.

Hey, you don't know what it's like. Certain people claiming to be engineers have optimized on finding out what you're trying to accomplish and either blocking it or taking credit for it. They also have figured out how to punish people who do work that they are not getting credit for (i.e. authorized). This is their whole 'job' for which they get impressive titles and money for doing little actual work and having little actual knowledge. While you are sitting there coding all day they are off telling some VP about how they have you working on their project that was actually your idea and your sweat. The best policy for an engineer is the one I described.

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#75

Post by Veratyr »

melted wrote: post #70

20% doesn't even work at Google. The reason being, if you care about your career, it ends up being 20% _on top of_ 120% you're already putting in. And I don't know about you, but I'd rather the company did not know about anything I do on my own time and with my own resources, so that they couldn't lay any intellectual property claims to it.

> 20% doesn't even work at Google. The reason being, if you care about your career, it ends up being 20% _on top of_ 120% you're already putting in.

From what I've heard from close friends who work at Google, this depends a lot on the team you're on and the manager you have. If you Google around a bit you'll see a lot of mixed feedback on the idea for this reason.

> And I don't know about you, but I'd rather the company did not know about anything I do on my own time and with my own resources, so that they couldn't lay any intellectual property claims to it.

They don't need to know about anything you do on your own time to lay IP claims on it. In California at least, there are very clear rules [0] that state that an employer can lay claim to IP under a number of conditions, none of which is that the employer knew it was happening at the time.

If it's anything worthwhile, it's likely to come up on your employer's radar at some point. It's better just to be upfront about such things instead of sneaking around. If you can't trust your employer you should probably find a new one.

[0]: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Veratyr wrote: post #75
melted wrote: post #70

20% doesn't even work at Google. The reason being, if you care about your career, it ends up being 20% _on top of_ 120% you're already putting in. And I don't know about you, but I'd rather the company did not know about anything I do on my own time and with my own resources, so that they couldn't lay any intellectual property claims to it.

> 20% doesn't even work at Google. The reason being, if you care about your career, it ends up being 20% _on top of_ 120% you're already putting in. From what I've heard from close friends who work at Google, this depends a lot on the team you're on and the manager you have. If you Google around a bit you'll see a lot of mixed feedback on the idea for this reason. > And I don't know about you, but I'd rather the comp…

[deleted]

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#77

Post by lacker »

Having worked at both Google and Facebook I prefer Facebook's strategy of "hackathons" and "hackamonths" to encourage people to sometimes work on different projects than they usually do, to mix it up. Hackathons (1-3 days at FB) are cool because they really encourage you to work with a new set of people. Hackamonths are usually tied to, "this project is with a different team and if it's going well I would join this other team". I think that is cool because they make it explicit that maybe your side projecty thing is going to turn into your real project. The setup is aimed at a similar thing to 20% time and I think it is overall more effective.

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#78

Post by onion2k »

codeonfire wrote: post #54

How to make 20% time: Just do it. Don't tell anyone. Tell that asshole trying to control your work to fuck off. When you've got something, tell the right people about it. Watch the other assholes at your job trip over themselves as they trash your work that you already got buy in from from the right people. Publish it. Launch it. Put it on your resume. You'll probably get fired because the assholes will resent that y…

So, if I'm understanding you correctly, you think the way to advance your career is to spend 20% of your time working on unsanctioned side projects in work time, writing code that will be owned by your employer that you can't publish legally without permission, all the while taking longer to do your assigned tasks and looking like you slack off for a day a week? And you think that if that gets you fired you'll move up your career ladder? Would you seriously hire someone who'd done that?

I wouldn't do that. I'd take some of my spare time, a few weekends, to document the idea and maybe hack together a prototype, and take that to "the right people". If they're going to be happy with the project then it's better to do it without pissing off everyone else.

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#79

Post by fra »

codeonfire wrote: post #54

How to make 20% time: Just do it. Don't tell anyone. Tell that asshole trying to control your work to fuck off. When you've got something, tell the right people about it. Watch the other assholes at your job trip over themselves as they trash your work that you already got buy in from from the right people. Publish it. Launch it. Put it on your resume. You'll probably get fired because the assholes will resent that y…

This comment is appalling, and so are most of the posts under it.

Re: Making 20% Time Work

#80

Post by nathan_f77 »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #19

We have successfully pulled off 20% for 5+ years now at Kiva, doing some of the things suggested here. However, the key thing we do is actually make the 20% be a full two-week sprint, it just happens every 5th sprint. That way, you can have the time to do some planning, suggesting, and documentation before setting out to build something and you get the full amount of time you needed to build it. We purposefully do tr…

That's funny, psychologically it seems much easier to accept 1 day per week spent on side projects. But a whole block of 2 weeks to work on whatever you want sounds really crazy, even if it's after 8 weeks of regular work. It sounds like it would work a lot better though, context switching can be a real pain.
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