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Has anyone been able to make this within a company? Where I work everyone gets 20% time and many of us do take it. Yet most of the projects worked on tend to be

by tjpnz 4y ago

Has anyone been able to make this within a company? Where I work everyone gets 20% time and many of us do take it. Yet most of the projects worked on tend to be lone wolf pursuits with very little collaboration. It's not as if the things people work on wouldn't be of interest to others either.

morelisp 4y ago
As a tech lead I try to check in with everyone's 20% time at least every other month. Junior and even mid-level developers, who are usually doing projects to learn a new language/framework/etc. often need help structuring their approach or just someone to rubber-duck with. But for people who are trying out projects that might eventually be merged into our prod code, it looks more like pair programming or PR-based collaboration. > It's not as if the things people work on wouldn't be of interest to others either. People on the team feel different pain points differently, and don't see the full picture for things they don't feel pain on until they see the solution. Alice has no problem writing a lot of similarly-shaped code and doesn't see the point of Bob's refinements to the code generator. Bob isn't on the on-call team and doesn't care about Alice's unified metrics collector that simplifies 20 different alerts.
kilroy123 4y ago
You're very lucky that you get this. I would kill for extra time to work on badly needed projects.
wccrawford 4y ago
I think 20% time is naturally opposed to collaboration. In my head, "20% time" is actually "work on what I want to work on", and I spend all week working on things someone else tells me to do. If I take some "me time", it's not going to be used for someone else. And if I'm going to do something for someone else, I'm going to just get my regular projects done. There's a small possibility that someone else has a great idea that I really want to help with, but that idea would have to be big enough that 2 people could work on it at the same time, too. So in the end, I think 20% Collab is a bit of an oxymoron.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  To note, you might want to collaborate with other specialists, like a designer if you're a dev, or infra people if there's specific needs. I've seen a few of these in 20%ish projects where there is no revenue in sight but it sounded like a cool idea to each participants.
immutology 4y ago
Have you tried to find someone to work with on a 20% project? I have found working on them with a coworker or two to be a lot of fun.

by tjpnz 4y ago

morelisp 4y ago

As a tech lead I try to check in with everyone's 20% time at least every other month. Junior and even mid-level developers, who are usually doing projects to learn a new language/framework/etc. often need help structuring their approach or just someone to rubber-duck with. But for people who are trying out projects that might eventually be merged into our prod code, it looks more like pair programming or PR-based collaboration. > It's not as if the things people work on wouldn't be of interest to others either. People on the team feel different pain points differently, and don't see the full picture for things they don't feel pain on until they see the solution. Alice has no problem writing a lot of similarly-shaped code and doesn't see the point of Bob's refinements to the code generator. Bob isn't on the on-call team and doesn't care about Alice's unified metrics collector that simplifies 20 different alerts.

kilroy123 4y ago

You're very lucky that you get this. I would kill for extra time to work on badly needed projects.

wccrawford 4y ago

I think 20% time is naturally opposed to collaboration. In my head, "20% time" is actually "work on what I want to work on", and I spend all week working on things someone else tells me to do. If I take some "me time", it's not going to be used for someone else. And if I'm going to do something for someone else, I'm going to just get my regular projects done. There's a small possibility that someone else has a great idea that I really want to help with, but that idea would have to be big enough that 2 people could work on it at the same time, too. So in the end, I think 20% Collab is a bit of an oxymoron.

makeitdouble 4y ago
To note, you might want to collaborate with other specialists, like a designer if you're a dev, or infra people if there's specific needs. I've seen a few of these in 20%ish projects where there is no revenue in sight but it sounded like a cool idea to each participants.

immutology 4y ago

Have you tried to find someone to work with on a 20% project? I have found working on them with a coworker or two to be a lot of fun.