Independent Developer Projects in the Workplace? 337
An anonymous reader asks: "My company wants to increase creativity and innovation, we our thinking of implementing a Google like policy of 20% of your time for independent projects but I can't find any details on how Google actually implements this. I am curious how they divvy up their time (1 day a week or 1 week a month)? How do you keep your real project from impacting it? At what point are the projects reviewed? Has anybody experienced other successful ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?"
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
So you've made your employees happier which makes them more productive, and you've taken something wasted (slack time) and turned into something useful (creative/moral boosting time).
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
~ Well, generally I come in at least twenty minutes late, I sneak in through the backdoor so Lumberg won't see me, then for the next hour I just kinda space out.
~ Space out?
~ Yeah, I just kinda stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working... I'd say in a given week I do about, oh, 15 minutes of real, actual work.
Re:Heh (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
It just so happens that most of my leads include "Userfriendly", Fark.com, and /.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously. Humans are not designed to do the same thing for 8+ hours strait. Even Mastadon hunting parties probably stopped to bathe in the brook and wrestle each other under water.
Re:Heh (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new homo-erotic Elephant killing cavemen overlords.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Funny)
Be careful. Mr. Goatse? A Mastadon mating injury.
Google is pretty unique. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:4, Insightful)
And yes, anyone who categorically bans OSS products is a frickin' idiot.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
Dinner tables and patio decks don't clusterfuck themselves at 2AM on a weekend for no apparent reason.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some might say it's an equally poor carpenter who tries to get through the day with lousy tools.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but if a blacksmith thinks he has terrible tools, he'll build himself new ones. If a developer thinks he has terrible tools...
You get the idea.
--LWM
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
Trust me, unless you happen to have "Vice President" somewhere in your job title, you aren't going to have much luck convincing a huge corporation to make that kind of radical chang
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
One does not preclude the other.
Especially if you say: use IE on intranet (activex galore), use firefox on internet (better security, yadda^2)
Were a fortune 180ish, and enough people use FF and Moz that tech support has resigned themselves.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2, Informative)
Sucks, but unless I can find a way to convince them, I'm stuck.
Now, I can't even imagine trying to pitch the idea in 'Independent Time for Projects' to this bunch...
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2, Insightful)
So wouldn't Firefox help all of you enforce that policy?
(I'm wondering, could you get fired for junk installed against your will, thanks to IE?)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:3, Informative)
That gives me a new direction to take with this, I am going to do some digging and find out if Spyware has been a problem in our Dept or (more likely) Sales. If so, you may have just given me some more ammunition that may catch their attention.
See, that's why I thought it would have been a worthwhile 'Ask /.'!
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:5, Interesting)
Major corporations don't usually have the calibre of employees across the board to make this sort of system work. They have evolved large bureaucracies as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent.
So I'd agree with a PHB at a major corporation, this probably would be a bad idea for his company.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite. Large bureaucracies prevent work and progress which results in "mediocre talent." Such employees could also easily be described as "intelligent, capable and bored."
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bureaucracies are a way of slamming everybody to a common standard with reasonable reliability. It is a low, but predictable level of capability, and frankly, that has its uses. It is also easy to set up, and we seem to have some almost instinctual knowlegde of how to set them up.
They aren't optimal in all situations and they are overapplied, but they have their place. I for one wouldn't care to have a criminal justice system that wasn't a bureaucracy; predictability in a legal system is very important. Yes, even when it is wrong... then you at least know something needs to be fixed. To use a Slashdot-type example, at least we know the patent system is broken. If the rulings were more random (at all levels, from the Patent Office to judges), it would be even harder to tell... and ultimately we'd be even worse off and the first order of business would be to establish some consistency! (Consistency is one of those things that you can have contempt for because you're so used to it, you don't realize how important it is; "familiarity breeds contempt". I'd rather have the current system than a random one, and I hate the current system. For instance, a random system would give an even greater advantage to the deep-pocketed company; they could just keep re-trying various suits until the dice came up their way. The system as it is allows some of that, but you'd see even more in a random world.)
The big problem with Bureaucracies is that one of the biggest counter-indications for its use is "managing a creative enterprise", and that's where we hear most of the bitching about it. The problem here, ultimately, isn't truly Bureaucracy itself; it is working as it always does. It is the application of an inappropriate organization system; you always pay for that, no matter what. Unfortunately, all other forms are more expensive (thought of in the proper economic terms, even Anarchy is more expensive; the communication issues necessary to behave in a coordinated fashion become intractable), and like I said, we seem to have some sort of Bureaucracy instinct, so they also have to be learned explicitly, which is another barrier to their use.
But ultimately, "[large bureaucracies evolved] as a way of extracting valuable workproduct from extremely mediocre talent" and "they prevent work and progress which results in 'mediocre talent.'"... when misused, which they probably are a majority of the time.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
billing programs (Score:2)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:4, Informative)
One of my engineering profs worked for 3M and said that there was no push to identify or disclose the projects you worked on in this 15%, much less justify them to superiors.
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
Any sane person would use this opportunity to 1) develop new skills (esp. if that positions them for a "better" job in the company) and 2) showcase their current skills.
This seems like a reasonable investment considering the average cost of hiring a new developer is something like $20k. For about the same
Are you hiring? (Score:3, Funny)
(ducks)
Mod Funny, not Flamebait!
Re:Google is pretty unique. (Score:2)
No, Google is pretty ordinary (Score:2, Informative)
I work independently out of emplyment hours COUGH! (Score:2, Funny)
is this a first post?
I just start doing it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I just start doing it (Score:4, Informative)
Way to go (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple.... (Score:3, Funny)
Just mandate that all
I crack me up.
Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that if a lot of businesses had this kind of open mind it would surely help open source software.
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do this, you need to make it crystal clear ahead of time who will own the results of their time spent noodling. Ordinarily, what you do with company resources on company time while an employee belongs to the company. The situation of a company formally giving employees "permission" to do whatever they want might muddy the waters legally, but it certainly muddies them in people's minds. Put the policy in writing and make people sign off on it.
Likewise, you need guidelines for what kinds of projects they can spend that 20% on; i.e. obvious dead-ends with no value to the company?, surfing the web?, etc.
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:2)
Of course, I'm of the opinion that if you're giving people time to work on side projects 20% of the time and then saying that anything they do outside of work is also owned by them (like Exxon or HP), then you are just being a jackass.
What I was getting at in my first post was that this person needs to enforce the time spent on other projects (only 20%) and make su
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:3, Insightful)
The case law on this question isn't quite so cut-and-dried. A salaried employee* using company resources** and acting under instructions from management*** to work on innovative new projects in their field****... sounds like a pretty good description of Work For Hire, and anything produced as WFH belongs entirely to the company, without any contract whatsoever. Th
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:2)
Thus making it a non-independent project by definition.
Some people might use it as an oppurtunity to start another business that competes with your own, which might not be what you had in mind.
The horror of it all. Why, people might invent something really useful and employ more people! Can't have that. Better to just install another time clock and take away some more benefits.
Re:Fantastic idea, but enforce it from the start (Score:5, Interesting)
Well - actually not. Why limit projects to current businesses. You might hit a few singles/doubles here - but if you really want your people swinging for the fences, let them dream and create completely new business oportunities for the company.
Go see how Post-it-Notes were created... I guess you can say 3M was in the glue/adhesive business, but really - a completely new business for them (I believe it is even "material" to their earnings)
Fridays are your day! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fridays are your day! (Score:2, Insightful)
What you need to do is to establish a level of productivity that you expect out of your employees, and hold them to that. If you want to allow for them to work on other projects 20% of the time, then factor that into your expected productivity level. Don't base it on anything else. If a guy gets his stuff done even though he spends 25% of his time on free stuff, who cares? Don't make your employees f
Few people deserve something like this (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Few people deserve something like this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Few people deserve something like this (Score:3, Interesting)
Time Management for Dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
As for managing your own time, it's easy: The required projects always come first. If you slack on your required projects, or you badly underestimate your timeline, then you don't get any time to work on your independent stuff. On the other hand, if you bust your ass on your required project and end up ahead of schedule, then you may get more than 20% of your time to work on independent projects.
After that, the only difficult thing is to convince upper management that it's worthwhile to let people work on independent projects rather than just piling on more requirements when it looks like people are ahead of schedule. Depending on the upper management, this may range from easy to completely impossible to do.
Re:Time Management for Dummies (Score:2)
What you get from this is people who pad their time a lot to have more free time.
Re:Time Management for Dummies (Score:2)
Re:Time Management for Not-So-Dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, he probably will, which is why it's important to explain to him why he needs to add 25%. If you spend 20% of your time on unrelated projects, it will actually take you 25% more calendar time to complete the original project. Suppose a project requires 160 hours of work (i.e. 4 weeks). If you spend 20% of each week doing other things, that leaves 32 hours each week for the project. 160/32 = 5 weeks, a 25% inc
Two words (Score:5, Funny)
Two words: Massage Bunnies
Nothing much. They just rub your shoulders after you've been sitting there pondering on the problem at hand (no pun) for long. It relaxes you.
It helps if they are wearing a tutu.
Off topic (Re:Two words (Score:3, Funny)
During the boom (I feel so old when I say that) I was on a "soft perks" team. The idea of in cube massage came up often (as did beanbag chairs). I went so far as to find a local place that offered corporate programs where you could buy x hours of massage a month, for company use. People would then just put their name on the list and get an appointment.
We never got them. And, I got kicked off the committee.
Re:Off topic (Re:Two words (Score:2)
one word... fluffer (Score:2)
Re:Two words (Score:2, Funny)
Two more words: With Release
Re:Two words (Score:2, Informative)
Incidentally, a full-time chef for an institution is $1,510/month. And, a chauffer costs $1,540/month.
In short, you can add a full-time massage therapist, chef and chauffer to your payroll for under $65,000/yr. I know there have been more than one project that would have been far better off ditching a developer and replacing them with those 3 instead.
Research (Score:2)
Big companies call this 6sigma or TQM or some other such things. Projects not central to core, to make everything work better.
Also having employees sign something indicating inventions done on company time belong to the company. Otherwise great ideas will walk out of your business to start there
Biotech Example as well (Score:2)
Your company has deeper problems (Score:5, Funny)
And you go as far as asking slashdot how to copy google's infrastructure... how original and creative!
Google's Methods.... (Score:2)
Re:Google's Methods.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dramatic results are quite rare. Why must every business pursue "dramatic" results? Why not pursue something more realistic, like plain results?
When farmers plant wheat, they don't call a meeting to announce they expect their new crop to conduct The Brandenburg Concertos in Vienna. But they do have bread for sandwiches.
How about this? (Score:2)
a) Employee can work on personal projects during X hours of a day.
b) Contract states that company is allowed to use product of employee's work freely, but not resell
c) Contract states that employee is given rights to resell product
The issues I can see come in where the project produces the component of a larger project. The company may wish to resell the larger project, so some allowance might need to be made, or maybe a close for xx percent pro
Re:How about this? (Score:2)
Google (Score:2)
And besides, it allows the company to at least partially profit from otherwise employee-owned ideas (say if they worked on it at home). Exempting those that signed dra
Make it part of the review/rewards process (Score:3, Interesting)
TPS Reports (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea being it was time devoted to thinking outside the box, such as trying new ways to do old things. Billable projects still came first, so this wasn't a hard and fast rule, and for the most part I just used it to account for my time spent on /. :)
Innovation vs. Laziness (Score:5, Interesting)
In reality it was a nice juicy chance to make great changes that would help the company in operations. We measured the time by hours per day. One hour per eight hour day was to be used independently. At our weekly meetings, ideas were discussed and progress was measured.
The nice thing about this was that it was voluntary. As there was no fincial incentive or reward for creativity, the time itself became the incentive. You could do whatever you wanted for that hour be it surf slashdot or play everquest.
Opposite is more common in USA (Score:3, Interesting)
The irony is that instead of protecting their business investments that kind of garbage just shuts the smart people in tech departments down. The smart folks know they should bite their lip sometimes rather than share all their creative energy.
Now if Google does not make sure claims on what their employees think up and work up, then bravo! Let them set an example that bean counters elsewhere might discover.
I'm guessing a flexi-time system. (Score:5, Informative)
At NASA, I was on a time-card system, and specified how much time I put in for each of the projects I was doing. The total time had to come to 80 hours for the fortnight. Overtime was prohibited, so if you worked over the 80 hours, you had to take a negative amount of vacation. (The total amount of vacation left went up as a result.) Also, if you left an hour early one day, you left an hour late sometime in the fortnight and simply "borrowed" that hour of vacation until you paid it back.
Projects also had a certain number of hours alloted to them, so if one project was running behind and another ran ahead, it was common practice to "borrow" time.
I imagine Google does something similar, where you have pools of time and can transfer between pools in order to obtain the time you need to do your independent project.
Such mechanisms are very primitive, largely because businesses have almost always operated on a very formal, rigid structure. Person A does task B for C hours a day, rain or shine. With no need for fancier time-management tools, nothing much has been developed. Flexi-time is probably the best system out there for this kind of thing, right now.
Try brainstorming together (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead, try something like a brainstorming session a couple of times a month.
People have different ways of doing this, but here is an example of how we did it at my work. The person holding the meeting had each of us just blurt out some ideas for our business. Not putting much thought into it. Just whatever came to mind. After that was done we would weed through intresting ideas an
I hate to be an ass but.... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe you should spend 20% of your time proofreading.
Heh, I'm just being mean, we all make mistakes.
Simply! (Score:2)
Easy!
Just provide me a free coca-cola supply, latest and fastest computer with a big flat LCD screen, pretty girls in the office to flirt with, and thats all!
(ps: a salary which allows me to buy a new Lexus every six month whould be also nice)
-1, Obvious (Score:2, Funny)
One day a week = 20%
One week a month =~ 25%
I'll take one week a month, please!
More like 2h a day. (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to do this anyway... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is one of the reasons that Google allows its employees to do the 20% on your own projects. It stimulates the mind subcociously to seek answers to the problems you are working on the other 80% of the time. I used to do this at work, primary by working on projects (My web site, new software ideas, etc) on my home system while I was at work if I got stuck or fustrated. They have pretty much deneied my ability to do this shutting off most outboand and inbound ports below 1024 (according to a friend in security there ar only 5 below 1024 now), and all ports above 1024.
Result huge drop in net productivity, and work quality. No one has really noticed yet since I am sort of a workaholic overachiver anyway. The net drop still puts me way above the average around here (Ie. I actually still turn in projects at least on time if not a bit early, though nowhere near as early as I used too(Bugs the hell out of me) There are people here that have not delivered a project in as far as I can remember, the project usually gets killed before they finish it because it has been languishing for so long. Comparitively if I ever turn a project in I look pretty good.
The reason I never get that release of switching to something else to take my mind of the problem.
Re:I used to do this anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
Tunneling to home to work on personal projects. (Score:3, Informative)
That works great... right up until the day they terminate you "for cause", resulting in losing not only your primary source of income, but also any chance at severance or collecting unemployment.
Any network security pro
Tutos based system (Score:3, Informative)
presumably (Score:2)
If you want the personal stuff done in lazy time, do it fridays
Post Its (Score:3, Informative)
What the official timeline [3m.com] doesn't make very clear is it took quite a bit of effort on the part of some folks within 3M to get 3M to market the notes. Notice the large gap in the timeline between initial samples and the product hitting the shelves. It was pretty bizarre - corporate secretaries were hooked on them and yet the product's backers couldn't convince corporate HQ to sell them.
Time accounting - myths and magic (Score:2)
Start with a 40 hour week.
Subtract out meeting overhead, junk/whatever (5 hours)
Subtract out misc. process overhead (5 hours)
leave you with 30 hours.
Now subtract out 20% (6 hours)
Schedule developers for 24 hours of work a week
As for progress reviews/etc.
The simple rule is leave it to the developer to tell you when there is progress to review. Plan on adding incentive awards for people that do good "idependant" work.
The idea is there i
IP Difficulties (Score:2)
If my company let me spend 20% of my time on my own projects, most likely the company would still own everything I create. (I haven't heard what Google's policy on that is).
I don't know about the rest of you, but if I knew that all my "personal" projects would have to be left behind when I get laid off or whatever, that wouldn't exactly inspire my creativity a whole lot.
Re:IP Difficulties (Score:2)
We have something similar here ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Employee : Hey Boss, I had a great idea! It's $X! I'd like to develop the idea a little and get back to you. That ok?
Boss : Your idea is horrible. It'll never work. Drop it and get back to the mindless labor I've assigned you.
Executive Meeting
Big Boss : Anyone with new ideas?
Boss : I came up with $X in my spare time. I'll have Employee work on it immediately.
Big Boss : Excellent work. I'm giving you a 2% raise for this and a nice bonus at the end of the year.
Back in the offi
Get the Right Mindset (Score:2)
By asking this I think you may have already lost the battle.
If you're going to be serious about this "real projects" are going to slip if they're not properly scoped. You can't take from the 20% time, it's not yours. (well, of course it is, but if you treat it like that you've lost).
The point here is that the 20% time is investment in the future of your business. You can't ignore the future and have a successful business which is what you're doing
Build project mentality into your culture first... (Score:4, Informative)
1.) Provide a personal project server w/ CVS access from both inside and outside the company. Personally speaking, traffic sucks where I am. If I can crank on something out durring rush hour, then pick it up over the weekend or at night as well as tinker at luchtime w/o copying files around it would be a godsend.
2.) Sponsor weekly project lunch where the company pays for pizza around noon and people are encouraged to discuss, demo, or work on personal projects. Show, tell, talk, encourage.
3.)Work the project concept into the job itself. When doing performance reviews, ask what people have done in the way of personal projects and/or professional development since the last time. Let it become a cultural expectation and include the concept that "we encourage and support personal projects around here" part interview process.
If you do put these things in place, don't forget to include some Slack [amazon.com] as well every now and then. Good developers write software in part because they love to, but even they need some downtime. Replace that show & tell pizza lunch w/ tickets to an afternoon geekfest type movie or something sometime.
Brain breaks coding instead of foosball (Score:2)
EA has a great approach to this... (Score:2)
20% Time at Google. (Score:5, Informative)
There are some caveats, but that's the broad strokes. News.google.com, Orkut and a bunch of stuff on labs came from 20% time.
Chris
Re:20% Time at Google. (Score:3, Informative)
(Which has the added side effect that nobody knows about the ideas that turned out to be completely useless . .
How Google really does it (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone gets their 1 day a week to work on whatever they want, *however*, in reality at Google you're slammed working on your project like anywhere else. Therefore, on Friday, you really need to finish patching that security hole in Gmail, so you 'bank' your time. Once your project lets up a bit, you withdraw your time and take n days to work on your personal project.
It seems like this is a fairly practical system for software development, which goes in waves of heavy work and then light times of regrouping and gathering requirements. The 20% gets used during those times when you'd otherwise be waiting for the next big thing to hit.
The interesting thing about Google is that people work to gather other 20%ers onto your 20% project, thereby increasing your project and hopefully eventually presenting it to mgmt for work as a real project (Orkut and Gmail started this way). If you can't gather others onto your 20% project, you're encouraged to find another project...
Anyway, I wish I could implement this system at my work, but my PHBs think it's "wasted time" and given our quarter-to-quarter existence, spending that 20% on customer issues is probably a better use of time, at least for the short-term.
Here's how to make it work (Score:3, Interesting)
The vast majority of people can't handle undirected activities, so we enforce some controls over junior people. We require them to learn foundation skills that they don't already know that will benefit both them and the company. For employees who are anywhere from an intern to a software engineer, there is a stock list of topics you can choose from, including langauges, techniques, coding standards, testing, new tools, etc. Unusual topics can be studied with approval. At the end, these employees have a discussion with a technical lead about what was learned (note: not a grilling, but a "fill in the gaps" kind of discussion.) This last bit also forces them to practice their communication and organizational skills.
More senior people, who have demonstrated innate initiative and curiousity, can choose their own research topics, but they have to present their findings to the rest of the senior staff. Therefore there's some peer pressure to pick relevant topics.
A very important additional benefit is that everyone has their own book budget, the size of which is dependent on experience. You can spend the money on any technical book you want without having to get prior approval.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I've seen many technical problems solved by having a Friday afternoon beer with my colleagues and just chatting a bit about the issue. I think it may be that we were more relaxed, or the change of venue or something, but the right synapses finally activated and you just knew you had the answer.
It's not easy explaining to the boss on Monday why you're working on a server referring to notes on a beer-stained napkin, but the results are usually
Re:BE COMPLETELY UNEMPLOYED (Score:2)