Well, I won't disagree on the 24 hours in a row thing. However, in a slightly different format, I would really welcome this kind of thing. Say 3 days where yo

Well, I won't disagree on the 24 hours in a row thing. However, in a slightly different format, I would really welcome this kind of thing. Say 3 days where you get to build something -- anything -- with or without your teammates. Quite a lot of people have never actually built anything from scratch in their life. And while 3 work days is not much time, that's really the point. You have to make decisions quickly, which allows you to see your mistakes -- quickly. Quite frequently when you're on a team (especially in a large corporation), you never hear anybody say, "Hey, let's try it and see what happens". Again, I'm all with you on controlled development and I have a reputation for being extremely stringent on trying to reduce risk. But that's exactly why you need to let your hair down sometimes and experience what happens when you don't do that. Developers who follow "rules" without knowing why they exist become poor developers. And... occasionally, that 24 hours of work you do turns out to be interesting for more than 24 hours. You fix up the initial problems, or even start it again from scratch. It's not like you've invested that much. But for me, it's usually fine to retire my projects after I've learned what I wanted to learn. And, yes, I write code in my own time for exactly this reason. But, I'd be ecstatic if my employer was happy to pay for my learning (actually, the current one does give me some time for that kind of thing... though I tend to continue to just pay for it myself... weird...)