Wow I would absolutely hate this. I'm not doing 20% time to trend shit for YOU on GitHub so that YOU can feel like you're doing something as a manager; intruding on and micromanaging "free time" until it's anything but "free". I'm doing it to answer a burning question I have about something and do some exploration whether YOU think it's useful or not. And before you whinge and bitch that I'm there to serve the compan…
Making 20% Time Work
81–90 of 142 posts
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#82How 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…
Agreed. I like the cut of your jib. IMHO denying orders to focus on what you're told rather than what you know is important is not only a hallmark to a good employee, nobody cares that you pissed off some random boss at work when you have something worthwhile on the resume (assuming you have a good reference though).
Saying "this project isn't important enough for someone like me" won't just annoy your manager. It'll annoy everyone, because someone else will have to pick up the work you dropped. You'll get the reputation for being awful to work with, and that is toxic to your career.
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#83How 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…
Id be happy to hire anyone who got fired under these circumstances
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#84I've never met anyone who has this luxury, quick poll: Do you have 20% time?
Do this in a separate thread.
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#85How 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 u…
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#86How 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 u…
I would rather see somebody genuinely advance in the organization by genuinely improving something (and taking some risk), while taking time from a stupid project, rather than by taking credit for work of someone else (but that never happens, right?). And in fact it's the latter people who get angry, so for that really doesn't matter on whose time you do it.
As for your suggestion, why is it OK for employer to steal employee's free time and not OK for employee to steal employer's time? We are talking about improvement to the employer's business, after all.
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#87How 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…
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 litt…
This is not universal, perhaps you ought to stop working for dysfunctional organizations
> The best policy for an engineer is the one I described
Again, not universally applicable. It might be the best policy for brogrammers.
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jobs don't give workers 28% time to do what they need. Workers exchange 72% of their time to jobs for income, and retain that 28% to do as they wish. It's worth noting there's a difference. Said your way, it's as if workers ought to be grateful to their jobs for allowing weekends. And that is fucked. Either way, it's still fucked that working and living isn't an even 50% split. It should be.
Hours of commuting and working per week: (2 + 8) * 5 = 50. Hours of living on weekdays per week, exclude sleep: 6 * 5 = 30. Hours of living on weekends per week, exclude sleep: 32. Total hours living per week: 62 Total hours working per week: 50 You're right, it's not an even 50% split. There's 6 hours of free time a day, plus 32 hours on the weekend. Three nights a week I watch a movie or a couple of episodes on net…
An even 50/50 split would be working no more days than you live--taking the day itself as the unit of measure. By the week, that means recognizing there's something inherently off with the notion that it's at all balanced to exchange 5 days to an employer so you can get 2 days to yourself in return.
If you want to make yourself feel better by counting how many hours you can squeeze out of a day for yourself, that's fine. I doubt I'm the only person who thinks that is no way to live.
In contrast to your example that, to me, seems insanely driven by the tyranny of the clock, a different take:
There are 365 days per year. When I decided years ago I wanted to achieve work-life balance, that left 182 days for working. By the typical American work week, if I was working a job, I'd be expected to surrender 251 days (for 2016). That's 70 days too many.
So, there are 183 days of free time per year.
Some of those days, I binge-watch Netflix. I don't even know how much time that totals.
Some days, I play games all night until the sun comes up.
Some days, I dabble with some code related to something I want to play around with, experiment, learn, rebuild, whatever.
Some days, I see the computer and say, "Fuck you, computer. It's gorgeous outside."
I wake up whenever by body wakes up. I shower. Grab some food or a meal shake. Head to the gym for a couple hours. Maybe take a nap, read, or just sit and breathe.
Some days I'm just sick of being at home, so I leave. I'm not counting any hours here, so I call up some friends out of town and say I'm coming their way for a couple days. I head out of state. I leave the country. I think of who I haven't seen in a while and get together with them.
> If a company is paying you for your time, what do you expect to be doing, if not to do what the company wants you to do? If you want to not do what others want you to do, and still receive a regular pay check, that's called taking on welfare.
That's an oddly binary and ideologically ridiculous notion you have there. As if there are no other ways to exist and subsist besides welfare and doing what others want you to do to receive a paycheck. I mean, come on. This is HN. This place exists for people who don't want to do what others want them to do in exchange for a paycheck.
P.S. I never said you shouldn't be grateful for having a good life. I think it's great when people recognize how good they have things, and are genuinely grateful for it. I was picking on a very subtle but important nuance in your original statement that I felt important to highlight. It's fine if you don't get the nuance, or don't care for it. For me, I like to remember where the agency and empowerment lies in my life. I'd never be able to stand a situation in which I actually had to think that an employer gave me a couple days of my life on the weekends before coming back to work.
Re: Making 20% Time Work
#90Wow I would absolutely hate this. I'm not doing 20% time to trend shit for YOU on GitHub so that YOU can feel like you're doing something as a manager; intruding on and micromanaging "free time" until it's anything but "free". I'm doing it to answer a burning question I have about something and do some exploration whether YOU think it's useful or not. And before you whinge and bitch that I'm there to serve the compan…
I also had the same initial reaction, but also keep in mind that these guys are paying your salary. You are literally there to serve the company in exchange for money. If your manager wants to make your 20% time more structured, then so be it. It's not free time, it's just a block of time set aside for research, experimenting, and innovation. You're still being paid for it, and it's not like you're being asked to wor…
Then don't call it 20% time. Fold it in as a "spike", in the normal sprint planning process.
The visceral reaction you're seeing to this system stems from the disconnect between the promise of "20% time" - that I get to work on something that I think is cool, without having to justify it to the company - and the reality, which is that it's just normal sprint work by another name.
If 20% time is subject to the normal planning and prioritization processes that the company uses for planning out the rest of its work, it raises the question of why you're placing that time into a separate bucket in the first place.