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20×10%

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

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Re: 20×10%

#11

Post by Cthulhu_ »

once_inc wrote: post #2

My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…

This is a great idea and every company should set time aside for it. Not just a "oh we reserve X percent for issues", but a dedicated, "nothing on the todo list" period.

I worked at a place once where my favorite time was at the end of the year; most people were off on vacation but they needed a skeleton crew in case of issues. This was when we did tons of small bugfixes, improvements and refactorings, and honestly that's the best part of the job IMO. Screw building features and adding customer value, just let me do janitorial jobs :D

Re: 20×10%

#12

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ducktective wrote: post #3

Idea for famous billionaires: support FOSS software and bug squashing streaks like this. It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors. Someone tag Mr Musk.

I mean the big tech companies rely heavily on these tools; surely they have the money to pay people a full-time wage, without using it as leverage to steer projects in their own direction?

They owe it to the open source community; they built trillion-dollar companies on top of open source.

Re: 20×10%

#13

Post by noufalibrahim »

e19293001 wrote: post #4

I didn't know this person before: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ A banking CTO who contributes a lot in emacs. I really like the image editing he did. Thank you for posting this. Made my day.

He's the author of Gnus. The news/email reader. It's a little crazy but a huge piece of work. Related to this was http://gmane.io/ which is a mailing list to NNTP gateway (so that they can be read using Gnus).

Re: 20×10%

#14

Post by noufalibrahim »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #12
ducktective wrote: post #3

Idea for famous billionaires: support FOSS software and bug squashing streaks like this. It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors. Someone tag Mr Musk.

I mean the big tech companies rely heavily on these tools; surely they have the money to pay people a full-time wage, without using it as leverage to steer projects in their own direction? They owe it to the open source community; they built trillion-dollar companies on top of open source.

They don't "owe" anything to "open source community". The licenses under which the software was made available more or less states that.

There are incentives to open source platforms so that they can build applications on top, support projects so that they can steer them etc. but they don't owe anything to the original developers.

Re: 20×10%

#15

Post by keyle »

once_inc wrote: post #2

My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…

That's a great idea. Sounds like they cared about the product long term.

Re: 20×10%

#16

Post by kioleanu »

once_inc wrote: post #2

My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…

We do that after every sprint and it does work wonders. So 2 or 3 weeks sprint then a week of this, sprint again, a week on the list, which can also be features - we maintain some 40 internal projects and not all projects get (or need) a sprint.

I personally like it because the issues are more diverse and I get to pick. For example, my last task was something a colleague complained about in a reporting tool that was also bothering me and I also got to learn something new

Re: 20×10%

#17

Post by Jenk »

once_inc wrote: post #2

My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…

I've been at a few orgs that do this kind of thing and most have found it valuable - but it is a double edged sword that will need to be managed. For the time not specifically allocated to "fixing bugs" or "removing tech debt" or whatever choice of phrasing there is, the rest of the time there is a (misguided) implicit pressure to permit quality to drop to make gains in delivery because "we have time allocated to fix things like this" - so the moral of this post is it is possibly more important to keep encouraging maintenance of quality throughout your team's cycle, and not let maintenance be ring fenced!

Re: 20×10%

#18

Post by donio »

e19293001 wrote: post #4

I didn't know this person before: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ A banking CTO who contributes a lot in emacs. I really like the image editing he did. Thank you for posting this. Made my day.

He is Programmerer Ingebrigtsen.

Re: 20×10%

#20

Post by sph »

once_inc wrote: post #2

My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…

That works as long as there's no scoring system, no leaderboard and won't affect your performance review at the end of the year, or you'll just create another version of the Cobra Effect.

"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

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