Having worked at both Google and Facebook I prefer Facebook's strategy of "hackathons" and "hackamonths" to encourage people to sometimes work on different proj

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.