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 le

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.