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Independent Developer Projects in the Workplace?
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?"
Who doesn't spend at least 20% of their workday doing things other than work?
I don't see any major corporations thinking this is a good investment. I don't see many PHB's going along with this idea, regardless of how successful Google is with it.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
You could always be completely unemployed -- then you'll have plenty of time to work on as many projects as you can.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
20% of your time doing creative projects? Sounds like most people would spend it drinking beer.
~ Crummy
really! :D
is this a first post?
And then when they see the results they usually are quite happy.
I wish more companies would implement something like this, those fascists SOBs.
Sig? No thanks, I'm trying to quit.
Just mandate that all
I crack me up.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
That is a great idea and I think you will get a lot of brownie points from your employees that care about such things. But make sure you enforce what they can work on. 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.
I think that if a lot of businesses had this kind of open mind it would surely help open source software.
I worked at a company in Quebec awhile back that had a similar policy. Each Friday, you were allowed to work on your own projects. About once each month, we had a small group presentation where we told other people in our group what we'd been working on, and how it's progressing. When the group decided that the idea was mature enough to tell others about, we gave a small presentation to the managers. They talked it over for a bit, and decided if it would be pursued further, or if we should find something else to work on. I found it quite nice to be able to work on my own things. I never made anything great, but a number of people had small teams put under them to help them work on their idea :)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Most people I have worked with can't get what they're supposed to get done with 100% of their workday.
If you have management that will actually allow you to do this, then it's real simple. The project manager will take projected timelines for your required projects, and add 20%. If you work efficiently, you'll end up with 20% of your time free to work on independent projects.
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.
I met someone once who didnt spend at least 20% of their time at work working... it was an ugly site... They had to get thick glasses and they had some funky curly hair, always wore a white shirt, black pants, and some sort of red tie... not pretty site (repeating for emphasis) he was always complaining about some pointy-haired boss or something...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
My company wants to increase creativity and innovation
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.
Free XBox, PS2
Google lets employees work on their own projects every Friday, and of course retains ownership of those projects.
I run a 2 GB squid proxy for our ~200 user LAN. Can I say reading
You need a research department. Some stucture to make sure working on independent projects that make sense to the business (so time research time doesn't become "create battlebot" or check my ebay business time.).
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 own (al la xerox parc and ethernet)
I don't think Google is the only place that does this. When I was working in the Bay Area several of the Biotech shops lured scientists by giving them time and resources to work on pet projects. I think it comes down to your people. If you give someone who is talented the greenlight to follow some of their mind's myriad pathes, they'll work cheaper for the greater freedom. In the long run you could not only keep the payroll down, but get some truly innovative products to market.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Let me get this straight... Your company wants to increase creativity and innovation yet can't even decide for itself how to "implement" independent thinking time?
And you go as far as asking slashdot how to copy google's infrastructure... how original and creative!
For developers, it would be a dream come true. It's an interesting experiment, and I wonder what the return on investment is for the employer. While working on an personal project, a developer could have an idea that could similarly be implemented into the company's projects.
Even it it is 1 whole day a week, it's not a big deal, b/c on the 5th day, a developer would still be around to fix anything that's broken.
I find it really interesting, and suprising, how many companies attempt to clone what\how Google does. Not all of Google's methods\soloutions are appropriate for other companies. I really think this can be seen simply in the data driven nature of google. It is impossible for some companies to impliment such methods because their infrastructure does not provide for it. Just as a company can't give "creative time" to their people and expect dramatic results.
This way should appeal to both PHB's and employees alike:
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 profit from projects resold using components goes to the employee.
Yes just like the indy project Orkut is now google. Maybe they mean independent (from management) but still owned by the company..
I doubt that 20% can be used for watching TV.
Give people, and their bosses, rewards/reconition based on these "extra" activites.
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
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 /. :)
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
20% of their time is their own projects. The work week is 5 days long. 1 day constitutes 20% of their work week. It doesn't take a google Phd to figure out that most likey they have a day you can work on it.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
Our company framed this concept a little differently so that it was more palatable to management. Each of us was to spend 20% of our time in "Process Improvement" initiatives. (Sounds very dry and corporate)
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.
well in france we have this little thing called the 35 hr work week... (i'm actually at 37) so when my boss said he didn't want me to do presentations on multichannel audio to the acoustics group (loosely translated: "it will eat time out of your schedule!") for which i already had powerpoint slides prepared from my master's degree, i decided to stop pushing for it at work. i do my side projects on the side. with a 37 hr week i don't have to try very hard to have enough hours to do my side work...
*grin* ~fabs
I would imagine another way is to just go by a honor system.
The Googleblog had a hint into this 20% free time thing a month or two back. Here is posting from a Google employee about it. Here is what he said:
The project stemmed from an idea I had a few months ago, and since then I've been working on it in my 20% time, which is a program where Google allows their employees to devote 20% of their working hours to any project they choose. What's really amazed me about this project is how in a matter of months, working on my own, I was able to go from a lunch table conversation to launching a new service. In my opinion, this is one of the things that really makes Google a great place; that the company's systems, resources and, most important, people are all aligned to make it as easy as possible to take an idea and turn it into something cool.
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.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
"...ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?" Two words: cattle prod.
To stimulate creativity, the best method is to pay for it. A guy by the name of Charles Koch, an economists by education, transformed his company through what he calls "Market Based Management". Essentially, everything the company does is up for grabs for improvement, and anyone that implements an improvement gets a percentage of the benefit. If the "improvement" actually costs more then the old method then that person gets their ability to "implement improvements" reduced. His company is called "Koch Industries" and is something like the 4th largest private company in the U.S. Also check out the articles about "Johnsonville Sausage"- they implemented a creative responsibility, learning organization change during the 80's that is still a hallmark of inspired management.
Every employeer I've worked for since 1995 has asked me to sign paperwork that effectively claims anything I think up as their own. Under such conditions where is really no such thing as "your own project." (Not moral and only arguably legal. People do need to work to eat, etc.)
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.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For many (including military subcontractors and automotive) you bill your time to a contract. Being creative on that is not part of your scope so if you get caught doing something out of your scope with that time you can get in big legal trouble.
Evolution or ID?
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 and discuss them. It doesn't have to be anything real complicated. Just take some time to get the gears turning.
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
"....and innovation, we our thinking of implementing a Google like policy of 20% of yo....."
Maybe you should spend 20% of your time proofreading.
Heh, I'm just being mean, we all make mistakes.
Has anybody experienced other successful ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?
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)
My boss always wants 110% for the company, so that usually results in me having -10% of my time for anything "independent".
(1 day a week or 1 week a month)?
One day a week = 20%
One week a month =~ 25%
I'll take one week a month, please!
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Arbitrarily picked. You work on your current task. You get tired, nervous, stressed. You make yourself a coffee and switch to your pet project. You calm down. once you calmed down, you go back to your current work. Repeat twice a day, for a hour.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
shift.
Sad really.
All your base are belong to Google.
..until the company shut off the bulk of the outbound network ports so now I can't do much more than browse /. to get my mind on other things to relax about the work I am doing.
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.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
A place I worked tried this.
The rule was that you got 4 hours a week (10%) to work on any project you wanted, provided A) that the project benefitted the community in a non-profit fashion, B) did not negatively impact the company's image, and C) no more than two people could be using their time allotment at once. In other words, help the community, and don't let the company look like an ass or bring the company to a halt in the process.
The developers also had to pick the same time each week for their allotment...their choice, morning or afternoon.
We called it "geek hours". Management bought into it. The theory was nice, but in practice, the developers couldn't or wouldn't decide what to do, they spent the time dinking around. The account management staff didn't respect the developers' time and frequently stepped on the "geek hours" by citing client/project demands.
If you can get it to work in your workplace, let us know how you did it.
A company I consult with has a policy like that in place, but instead of enforcing it by separating the work like you suggested they have a flexible Tutos based system which provides time tracking capabilities, so developers are free to divide that time as they please. They modified Tutos to display the ratio between the time spent on company-based and volunteer work in a graphical way on every page. The work done for the company is shown as a green bar and volunteer work is shown as a blue bar which turns red if the ratio goes beyond what is expected. It works well, the managers do not even have to keep a close eye on things because most people are disciplined enough if they are made aware of how they are spending their time like that. Of course they could always lie and pretend to be working on a company-based project, but without any significant results to show they can't do it for long. It's a cool system if you have moderately disciplined and self-motivated people who enjoy that kind of freedom and know to appreciate it.
20% of your time on creative projects? This would be great for creative, talented people. Everyone else would just be browsing /.
(ducks)
Mod Funny, not Flamebait!
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
if its 20%, thats 1 day a week (presuming a 5 day week), or two afternoons or something.
If you want the personal stuff done in lazy time, do it fridays
What the official timeline 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.
Do these projects end up belonging to the company or the developer? It should be made clear.
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 is a huge number of people that will read slashdot for an approved 6 hours a week, but a few will get very interesting results - and those FEW projects will make it worth the companies time overall (oh and by the way - the few people will get good raises, the others won't)
If you try to force regular reviews/progress reports, you are mearly adding overhead that will slow projects down, and might make longer term projects impossible (if I feel I have to show progress once every review period, I'll only do things that I can fit into a review period)
It all boils down to this - do you trust your people ?
If you do it is simple
If you don't - why do you employ them ?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
As long as the allocation is fair, and your company has some chance of success, these tend to generally motivate people as well as anything else.
The past 2 projects I worked on tuned out great because I broke from the laborious "project management" route and just dove in and got it done. One project was something I just thought was a good idea. A good manager will give you enough rope to either hang yourself with or to make something great.
If articles like this are able to frame this concept in management-friendly "bizspeak" so that PHB's give developers more freedom, so much the better.
Currently bidding on sig
The process of doing independent projects on company time can be extremely fruitful. Peters and Waterman describe a couple of companies where this kind of thing takes place in their book "In Search of Excellence." One company that seemed to be particularly successful at turning employee driven projects into products was 3M.
On the other hand, Clayton Christensen in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma" points out that companies tend to ignore disruptive technology even when it is produced by their own employees.
In other words, encouraging employee projects can be extremely fruitful but most companies don't do a very good job of it. For this to work, you need other changes that may be too much for management to stomach. I would suggest reading Christensen's books because he seems to be the alpha-guru on innovation these days.
It's "not a pretty sight".
What would cleaners do with their 20%?
test google...?
improve social skills...?
comb their brooms...?
or maybe their're the ones that really keep google running.
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.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
check out urbandictionary.com if you don't know what it is.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
There is a recent article that talks about how researchers are given time to work on side projects, so long as they publish results. Of course, there's a big difference between 'researchers' and grunt coders with deadlines.
Let X = Good Idea
:
:
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 office
Boss : I presented my new idea, $X, to the board. They liked it. I want is completed in $Nominal_Time/4.
Employee : *sigh*
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
Is everyone aware that every thing they do at
work belongs to their employer?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
How do you keep your real project from impacting it?
By asking this I think you may have already lost the battle.
If you're going to be serious about this "real projects" are going to slip if they're not properly scoped. You can't take from the 20% time, it's not yours. (well, of course it is, but if you treat it like that you've lost).
The point here is that the 20% time is investment in the future of your business. You can't ignore the future and have a successful business which is what you're doing if you intrude on the 20%.
Think of it like the fuel reserve on a navy helicopter. You can invade it but only if there is a war on and losing the helicopter is an acceptable risk. Your employee is the helicopter.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As per the discussion, for the same reason google does as well as others. It encourages creativity, and one won't be punished for experimenting (provided said experiment doesn't damage company property) or attempting to think outside of the box. One might ask why a company would pay for employees to work on Open-Source projects, but some do.
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 draconian *your brain is ours* contracts, the company misses out if the employee thinks up something big outside of work.
...are not universal standards of measure, as your question implies. Google business enjoys a virtual environment of having both seamlessly and transparently so that these are interchangable commodities.
The success of your creative project is reduced down to proving the Time Value (ie. 20%) in an environment without Google's Econcomic Currency.
It's fairly common amongst R&D companies, or R&D divisions of large companies, for researchers to have this exact deal - 20% of time, or thereabouts, on their own projects. The only thing unusual that Google has apparently done is extended this deal to people involved in more directly product-related development. However, software development is an unusual sort of business which has a lot in common with R&D, especially at a place like Google. In short, the main innovation here is that Google has managed to get some positive PR out of a practice that has been going on for decades.
Some people have had great success with these, and they don't (have to) depend on management approval, just motivated learners.
I've been part of a couple of these, we tried "Programming Windows" by Petzold (this was 1994), and SICP more recently. With the right group of people, you can learn a lot and do some cool stuff.
If you have the motivation to spend 20% of your day building an independent project, chances are, you also have the motivation to have that project under your own terms (i.e., your own development company). From the perspective of the individual and not the corporation, I would rather spend my time funneling that kind of motivation into a system that sells and/or ends on my own terms. Even if the company offered independent project terms, I would still save my best project ideas for my own external projects.
I work within an "Advanced Projects" group at my company, an aerospace firm. My department allows people to spend up to 10% of their time per week working on projects not related to their assigned work. These are generically termed "research" and there are two constraints:
1. The research must be related somehow to work. Since our department works primarily in software development and on a variety of operating systems, this allows for a wide variety of projects. Also, our department head allows a very broad and fuzzy definition of "related". In practical terms you can justify pretty much anything except surfing pr0n sites or running an ebay business.
2. One must periodically (a couple of times a year) report one's work to the department in the form of a brief talk/discussion. This is intended to spread information around and to keep the projects from becoming too frivolous. We have a weekly meeting at which one of the department members makes a presentation. The presentations can be informal. It's a small price to pay for a fairly generous benefit.
What was surprising to me and to my boss was that very few people in our department choose to take advantage of this 10% of freedom. We're not sure why. One theory is that four hours a week is not really enough to entice people. The other theory is that the idea of having to make presentations to the group turns people off. (However, we draft people into making presentations anyway, even if they're not taking advantage of the research program, so I don't really buy this theory.)
Mandating something like this is counterproductive. People either have the drive to do things on thier own via personal projects or they don't. If having employees who have the drive to learn more and improve themselves via projects is important (and I believe it is), you need to make the cultural changes to enable it. Many people are likely to be doing things on thier own time as it is. You should start there and then begin accomodating "work time" to do it once you see people have the personal commitment not to abuse the freedom. Here's a few suggestions to encourage personal projects to start with:
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 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.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Our company is very much into creativity. We've even brought in a great consultant: Michael Vance. Vance worked with Walt Disney during the heydey and was very much a part of starting Disney World in Florida. He's also written several books about thinking out of the box.
http://www.thinkoutofthebox.com/
http://db.etree.org wouldn't be what it is today without my ex jobs. Implementing a great idea immediatly made working in powerbuilder tolerable.
... where employees are allowed to work on their own projects during their 4 hours of "sleep" time each day.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Google requires that each employee work on such a project every Friday. That is how they make up the 20%.
On the other hand
How can I find a company that can offer
short term support for small open source
projects.
For example to field single signon
like the example in O'relly's Apache
Moduals book.
An idea I read about, is what I would call democratic management.
The idea is simple that the manager should be chosen
bottom-up instead of top-down.
A team member can challenge the team manager for the manager position.
Then the team vote between the two for the new manager.
If the challenger win the vote, he/she becomes the new manager.
If the challenger lose the vote he can't challenges the manager
for the next 90 days.
The team manager can challenges the department manager.
The department manager can challenges he's manager,
etc. up to the top.
In this way the best manager talent raise to the top.
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
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
How about letting developers play with their pet projects on company time that is left over after meeting a dealine early( reasonably set deadline )?
It might have the serendiptious benefit of developers not wasting time surfing the net if they know it can recycled into something more rewarding.
Anyone managing teams, especially of software developers, needs to read this book:
2 633439/qid=1106084568/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-7684 966-5920746?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/093
I found that book because lots of other writings referred to it. Joel on Software and Death March both cite it extensively, and for good reason.
Almost everything Google does is spelled out in that book as the best way to manage people. Almost everything companies that suck do is shown as what not to do if you want to add value to the company.
Unfortunately, management classes teach rediculous methods all based on squeezing more from your workforce by squashing their individuality and saving on measurable costs like work environment while losing unknown amounts on things like lack of productivity, turnover, etc. because those are harder to measure.
We would dedicate Friday afternoon to working on personal projects, which worked well since not alot of regular work is ever completed on Friday afternoon. We then had quarterly presentations of the personal projects, which provided the opportunity to see the things people where working on.
If your goal is to inspire your team, LET THEM BE CREATIVE. Google has the right idea!
;o)
Your employees will learn to use the tools better, they will find their creative energy renewed, they will feel challenged and they will be better employees.
Or you can crush the life out of the little vermin, the way my manager does.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
A former employer wanted to do something similar, but approached it from another perspective.
They took an area they wanted to expand their product line into, but where they had previously failed due to technical/financial limitations.
Rather than have people work in their free time, they simply had a contest for teams to solve the problem in any way they could think of. You had to work with coworkers during off-hours, but the top three ideas (as voted on by your peers, not management!) all received cash prizes.
The end result is that some innovative ideas were produced and people were glad to work on it because there was a possibility for a $ reward as well as recognition from the company.
It's not quite what the poster was asking about, but I think it's a great idea that many companies could use. It encouraged employees from different areas to get together and brainstorm and made them feel empowered because the whole engineering group, and not just a PHB, would be listening to their ideas.
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
I'm on a system similar to that, but informal and a bit sloppier. I simply work "about" 20 hours per week, plus or minus a bit each week. Some of this is at home, some in normal business hours on site, some on site outside business hours (server maintainance, etc). It usually balances out very well.
If I need to a lot more for a while, they even pay me overtime.
Being able to say "I can't be stuffed going to work today and there's nothing critical on. I'm going sailing." is worth a lot to me.
Generally, where I work, I have found resistance to formally "Let the Engineers work on whatever they want" one day a week.
It is far easier to just work on your own projects a little bit from time to time, and then show Management later what you have done (if there is something to show for it).
If I did nothing but what they asked me to (or what marketing thinks the product needs), I would be a mediocre engineer. In my opinion, good engineers will go out on a limb and investigate on their own. This doesn't have to be an extensive effort, but enough to see if its worth working further on.
Once I have something to show, it is far easier to get management to buy into a larger effort.
Just like the old saying goes, "it is easier to beg for forgiveness then ask permission".
The 15% rule is one of the more famous examples of steps that 3M takes to ensure one of the best company cultures to work it. It's studied pretty closely in Built To Last, a book about long lasting and healthy companies.
As mentioned in your link, Post-It notes were invented in that 15% of time. And that's just one example of quite a few big breakthroughs dicovered while hacking around.
J
I have a friend who's an Uber Tech Lead (I am not making that up) at Google and he told me how it works in practice:
:)
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.
At my former job, they tried to do something like this only they suggested that we focus the project to improve the company or make the work flow better. There was never any support for the idea once it was mentioned and they quickly forgot about it.
However, my co-workers and I didn't forget and we used a "research" billing number for the time we spent on the projects and used free time between real projects and lunch tiem to work on them. The result was a job ticketing system, the company intranet, and a digital archive of previous work.
After putting the job ticket system into production, management quickly stopped using it when they realized that a "paper trail" was now in place to document their screw-ups. It died a quick death.
The intranet is still being used, but the new company President felt that many of the fun things we added to it were "Not job related" had us remove them and killed the reason most employees would visit it. She also ended the "Fun Committee" whos job was to try to plan one fun activity each month.
The digital archive died when I left the company. They never asked me where the database was or the numbering system I used to mark the drawer full of CD's and DVD's of past projects. I was in the process of transfering old projects from old DAT tapes to CD or DVD since the one Tape drive we have is no longer made and could crap out at any time.
On the plus side, many of the things we created was a practical test of new code and became a testing ground for doing many things which could then be used for client projects.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I had a couple of interviews with Google (which I rather enjoyed, but no job sadly...), and I asked the interviewers specifically about this.
:^)
From what I remember, workers do have the time to work on their own projects, but the project had to be okay'd because it had to be of benefit to Google. I understand that Orkut came around like this.
I proposed continuing my thesis research if I was offered the post. Shame they didn't employ me because I've since found out some wicked stuff about how people search for information. (which I keeping to myself until the right time. Watch the HCI journals in about 2 years.)
Umm, any venture capitalists out there?
None of my employers have granted time to work on personal projects or discretionary time. This is one of the reasons many of them went belly up.
This idea has many advantages besides just helping to attract better people. It can allow people to be more productive and innovative. At least for creative people like engineers, programmers, and scientists. Making it work for non-creative people is more difficult, though they can still benifit from things like learning how to use a spreadsheet or database or even how to program.
One implementation is simply to allow people 20% discretionary time that is exempt from management control. With people who aren't goof offs, this has considerable benifit. The projects might not necessarily be unrelated to work. The time could be used to solve problems that interfere with your productivity without having to justify it to micromanaging managers. Creating a database of parts in the company stock room that is actually useful to engineering. Instead of "RESISTOR", you have "RESISTER VALUE=10ohms WATTAGE=1/4W PRECISION=1% PACKAGE=0805". Management thought this was a waste of time but the real waste of time was not having the database; Less than 1 man month of time is needed to build the database but not having it was wasting multiple man months every year. Another example was creating a program to handle purchase orders instead of writing them out by hand (this was adopted company wide). These projects aren't intellectually stimulating but they reduce aggravation and boost productivity.
Discretionary time would be easier to sell to management than purely personal projects. Discretinary time would be work related but exempt from management control.
For over 20 years I have worked on a high tech haunted house. I take vacation time to do it although one of the participants did manage to get some annual paid sabbatical leave. The primary participants all worked in major R&D labs. But ironically, the management in the R&D labs was afraid to try anything new. The halloween show, termed "frivolous activity" by one boss, actually had considerable benifits to our employers. All of our employers have benifitted from technology developed while working on the show. One of the big benifits of doing halloween projects is that you can risk failure. If you try something new and it doesn't work, it is no big deal; in reality, the projects did work though some had to wait until the next year. Software waveform synthesizer techniques used for halloween laser shows were later used on industrial motor controls. A "frivolous" color organ using flourescent lights (traditionally considered undimmable) instead of incandescent lights led to office lighting controllers that saved energy. Halloween robotic projects led to bomb diffusing robots. And the junior people working on the show learned things like prototyping techniques and how to program microcontrollers.
In engineering, the shortest distance between two points (i.e. finishing a project) is rarely a straight line. This is a concept that most managers do not understand; sanctioned discretionary time is a way of letting engineers manage their time more effectively.
The choice of personal projects is often influenced by the problems faced in the workplace. Problems prototyping equipment leads to work on CNC machine tools. Problems cramming circuitry onto PC Boards leads to work with FPGAs. Utility programs are written to fill in the gaps in existing software.
The maximum benifit to the employer is likely to come from projects that are tangentially related to the companies products.
The employer should have a shop right in personal projects done on company time but it is a good policy to release the projects under a business friendly open source license (i.e. BSD style over GPL).
Paid sabbatical leave is institutionalized at many universities. For example, a professor may get one semester at full pay or two semesters at half pay every seven years.
Many companies give eductational benifits to employees. But for people with technical skills, working on personal projects can be much more effective than stuffing them in a classroom.
Any network security product or admin worth their salt can detect this kind of "tunnelling" activity with minimal effort. Whether they "choose" to notice this is a different matter, until your productivity drops or an excuse is needed to trim staff.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
i spend 20% of my time working and the rest of the day working on my own projects.... Why not it's worked for the past two years and they keep giving me a raise...
Bullring
Even the most successful tech consulting companies generally have less than 80% "utilization" of billable human resources. When I ran such a shop (actually in excess of 80% most quarters, but we were a crazy successful bubble shop), we had our developers (including graphic artists) run projects of their own, just like the billable ones in every respect. They were merely prioritized lowest, so billable projects would preempt them on a daily basis (sorry, guys). The products of those projects were owned by our corporation, just like the rest: our corp was the customer of these works for hire, just like the banks were for their billables. But any successful project at the least found its products going into more productive projects, on which their developers would get placed - making their jobs easier (therefore more $:time for them, as less time for the same money). And anything we commercialized got the developers cut in. Which only made sense in motivation through the entire product lifecycle. A few developers left with their own projects, and we didn't stop them - notably a guy we were firing for some "bad acts", who took "his" porno website template with him, and probably made more money with it than we did without him.
--
make install -not war
If we want to get creative here we just burn one.
We have a so-called "non-directional" day where I work. It's pretty nice; every Wednesday you're supposed to work on some sort of side project. There's a few around you can join, or start your own. The caveat, of course, is that the company owns any outcome from this, but that's fair since it's their time. Of course, if you contribute to a GPL licensed product, then the company is the proud owner of the copyright to a GPL'ed patch, so you can do that if you want. It's also possible to get approval to start a new GPLed project, and people do have independant (non-GPL) projects that they work on in their "real" spare time that the company doesn't have any sort of claim to.
You do have to get the project approved, but that's only to prevent you from starting a "let's blow up the company" type of project. The only one that was ever been turned down was one that would directly compete with us.
The main problem has actually been getting people motivated to start a project, and then keeping them working on it (especially in the face of real deadlines). A few have turned out to be surprisingly interesting, but we haven't had any notable successes like Google has, at least not just yet. There have been a few sizable improvements to internal projects that came from this though. A key factor was moving the day from Friday to Wednesday; when it was on Friday there was just about no motivation to get started on these things.
If you can convince your management to approve this, it's nice and rewarding.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
"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."
What about IP issues?
Since I didn't see anyone else post these tips, I thought I would add some practical suggestions for implementing this sort of thing.
I think the keys are:
1) Structure things so that people get positive feedback on their side projects.
2) Create "deadlines" to encourage people to complete their side projects rather than fiddle around but never bring things to demonstratable state.
3) Encourage stimulating technical discussions beyond just the problems that people are working on. These discussions usually encourage people to tackle new things.
4) Encourage collaboration - two people on a project can maintain motivation more easily than just one person.
In practice, these can usually be combined into just one or two things. For instance:
a) A previous employer had occasional "Monday technical challenge" emails that would go out. It usually covered some interesting problem (usually unrelated to work) and asked people to solve it. On Wednesdays, there would be a lunch discussion of the problem. Many of these discussions led into side projects.
b) In a similar vein, you could have monthly lunches in which people show what they've built. It helps with the deadline issue (people are now aiming for a particular meeting) and the feedback issue (people get pride of showing off).
-Peter
Be sure to read Tom DeMarco's "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency". This concise book does a great job with the business case for policies like this and how to best shape them.
The bigger companies pay the most and they get the talent they want.
/.ers are so dead on against big corps that will blind themsleves to the glaringly obivous...
People working in companies with big bureacucracies go rounds people in small companies, with the honourable exceptions, and there are economical reasons for this.
I know now you will throw bunches of small companies that got lucky and managed to get one or two smart guys. Those are the exceptions, not the rules. Smart people go were the money is, not for selfish reasons necessarily, but because with money you have better chances of developping your talent.
Some
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
young whippersnappers. I was fiddling around with Litestep, and I had 4 desks visible on a pager. It was the closest thing to Linux that I had in a Window$-only firm. ANd it was harmless enough so that I could easily switch back to the Redmond colors when audit time came...
But the Themes man...THe Themes...
Where I work our independent project time is pwow: playing world of warcraft :)
I used to work for a company that, no joke, had a masseuese (sp?) who came in once a week to give everyone a rub-down... she was pretty hot too. I have no idea how much she was paid, but the company went belly-up and took a bending-over in a last-distch acquisisition deal pretty quickly. we spent more money on perqs like massage bunnies and free popcorn and cool high-def monitors than even a fraction of what were bringing in proffit-wise...
so, with appologies for all the two-part vocab, we can only dream of massage bunnies, because it's time to update the resume when they show up (maybe that's 'murphey's law' of massage bunnies?)
ah 2000.... that was fun....
Considering that creativity and inovation were key words in your post, why are you so darn concerned with how this time issue is managed. Why not let the employee decide how to allocate their time, what type of projects they will work on, whether they will work in groups or as individuals, and if any deadlines will be applied. The pervasive veiw that employees will jump around like a pack of wild monkeys unless you give them structure is sadly indicitive of your view of your employees. Lighten up and some inovative and creative projects just might come out of your 20% policy.
A 2 hour day? That sounds great!
--LWM
I am developing a database design program (SourceForge name is dbarchitect) which I have been using in my side businesses. One of my coworkers started using it to design his databases at work.
I showed it to my boss, who liked it, and now it is becoming a part of our work processes. Since it speeds my application development, my bosses are happy to let me have it. I use some work time to improve it, and nobody cares because my increased productivity outweighs the work time I spend on it.
At my company, we provide the research time between projects. This allows people to focus on the new activity and to not affect deliverables. Typically people get a one to two weeks of open time between projects.
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.
Working in a major university research lab, I'm in an environment which thrives off of innovation. Of course, there is no substitute for surrounding oneself with talented people. Nevertheless, creativity can be stimulated by reading and researching ideas. For example, I recently had trouble with an interface I'm working on, so I read a leading book on interface design. Not only did this fix my problem, but it also gave me several more ideas I plan to implement in the interface. Expanding one's worldview will always accomplish the task of enhancing creativity.
Creativity? uh, why do you think we're on here?
Obvious a newbie slashdot user.
I do this all the time. In fact I even showed my boss I was working on writing an ncurses based mail client (which has nothing to do with my job). He didnt mind because he knew I was improving my programming skills.
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% increase over the original plan.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I don't have time to do "other stuff". I'm too busy convincing my boss that I don't need to work overtime and weekends.
We did this from 1996 through about 1999. Some time spent building one new company, some time spent on a little software project. The company is still a steaming pile of monkey shiz losing money hand over fist but the software product went on to impress AOL. Not that we can all birth the next killer app....
Quake Time
I work in Professional Services for my Chinese-managed company... they're strict about certain things, but I can still get away with stuff.
Basically it seems like no matter where you are, if you have a little downtime and you devote it to a project that will help the company, they'll pretty much give you leave to do whatever you like. It's not like management is going to say "No, you can't do that project that is going to make our product more valuable." - unless there's some good reason, like you're giving away company secrets (oops).
...how the fuck do you free up 20% of your work time when your staff has 150% of its time already tied up with the work of 2 people per worker under turnaround deadlines that are 3 months short of reasonable?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
This idea was used at chemistry nobel prize winner Kary Mullis office when he invented a process that reproduced DNA litterally a billion times, starting the period of time where cloneing could be possible.
He showed it to his boss, and the boss' company sold the rights of the process for millions of dollars with none of the money going to Dr. Mullis.
Maybe the tradeoff of giving the employee less 'labor time' would still be worth the rights issue, but this kind of thing is bound to repeat itself.
We had this when I worked in the web-dev team at Dell. Friday afternoons was "personal project" time. I guess they figurued no-one did anything on Friday afternoon anyway. It has to be said, however, that most people didn't take it for anything more than an excuse to not even *pretend* to be working. The few people that took it seriously tended to use it to learn new languages and explore new ideas, rather than develop anything anyone would ever consider useful. This helped their CVs, though, more than it helped Dell - I got some Java onto my CV that I didn't have before, which helped me to get my next job after Dull (sic!).
Que voy a hacerle yo
Si me gusta el whisky sin soda
reading and posting on /. Does that count?
Has anybody experienced other successful ways to stimulate creativity at their workplace?
------
Usually when marketing sends an RFP to outside vendors, our team's creative juices start flowing. The prospect of a possible layoff is very stimulating.
Do not attempt to assume ownership of anything employees do with this 20%. A big part of the motivation to do anything useful in this department within the domain of self-improvement is ownership over what you create. If I come up with an idea that is useful to others that I can learn a lot from doing, and the company comes in and says: "we reserve all rights to whatever you create", I am not going to bother doing anything. In fact, the only restriction should be that the works are open source somehow. That way, the employee retains ownership, the company can freely use the work in their own projects, and the organization can claim they are contributing back to the community, and the original employee project will get expanded and built upon (which helps push the state-of-the-art). Everybody wins.
Join Tor today!
Creativity starts with the people you have working at your company. If you want creativity you hire creative people. You cannot change a few work conditions and increase the innate creativity of your employees.
Google has created an entire culture to recruit, encourage, and leverage creative people. Recruiting creativity starts with the Google Aptitude Test and Prime Number billboards. They encourage it with the 20% policy. Finally, they leverage and reward the creativity with actually releasing and using the ideas, while also rewarding the employees.
If you really want to increase the creativity in your company you need to think about a few things:
1.) Management will lose control
2.) You will lose money short term
3.) You will need to reshape your workforce
4.) Your current employees will not be happy
5.) Does the trading unpredictability for creativity benefit you in your industry?
Here's why:
1.) As you allow for creativity, you necessarily have to give people more freedom. Managers will not know or understand what employees are working on.
2.) You will not see results of your transformation for quite a while.
3.) If your company is not currently creative, chances are any creative employees you had left the company. You may need to hire creative people and let rigid employees go. People work where they fit in. If they don't like the company culture they move on, and that's mutually beneficial to the company and employee.
4.) As above, the people you have are used to the status quo. Changing expectations and company values may not fit their personalities and expectations.
5.) To steal an analogy from another post, do you really want people to freelance in the legal system? Of course not. Google has a very unconventional industry; innovation is how they make money. Does working outside the norms of your industry reward or penalize you? It's possible your entire company would not benefit from being more creative, maybe a change to a single division or group of your company would reap higher dividends.
20% of time, that's one day per week. It would make more sense than a few days at the end of each month, since you would forget what you were doing three weeks before! My (UK) employer gives me Friday afternoon to work on personal stuff. It's only 10 percent but it's a start. How do you keep your real project from impacting it? If there is a tight deadline, I ignore my personal work and do work work. At what point are the projects reviewed? My personal work doesn't get reviewed (it's personal - duh) but I can give a "show and tell" on it any time. This guy seems to be finding it so hard to imagine how this can work.. It's quite simple really, once you realise that cracking the whip only breeds resentment.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
At my previous job, I wrote several small programs at home to help me on my job. Why did I write them at home? Because I didn't have the tools I needed at work and I enjoy programming small projects. The programs helped make my work easier and (to me) were worth the effort. [I had several coworkers ask me for copies of one of them.] I wish I had been able to write them at work. (Would've made testing a lot easier :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The simple approach to finding people abusing the system is to look for activity that doesn't fit normal patterns of use -- long lived sessions with lots of data flowing in both directions just are not something you normally see on TCP/80 and TCP/443. These patterns indicate something abnormal, usually IM, sometimes something more sinister.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Please note that I wrote: tunneling over HTTPS, not HTTP. I.e., over TCP/443, encrypted by SSL. Actually, in our case users most often use proxies; i.e., they tunnel over CONNECT requests. Snort signatures doesn't help a bit here, neither does "censorware".
Since the proxy typically terminates connections quite quickly, traffic analysis doesn't bring a lot -- there are no long-living connections. But some employees have quite intelligent setups and do regular re-connects. Due to heavy `normal' usage of the proxy and due to heavy SOAP usage over SSL, it's not easy to distinguish these frequent requests from the problematic ones.
The context: We're talking about companies with either >50,000 employees, or with IT staff >3,000. No ISP, large global company networks, connected to many suppliers and vendors. No ADSLs, no cablemodems visible, internally there are just VLANs that may be arranged as the network guys want. (And the LAN guys don't really talk to the security guys -- two separate departments, not even in the same org branch...) Dynamic blocks (i.e., DHCP) are used by all workstations, only servers have fixed IP addresses. This is a fairly common situation that occurs at several of my large customers.
Traffic analysis works for specific high-risk departments or for special business branches, and we do it there; but not `with minimal effort' for the general case. And this minimal effort was what I was questioning. Yes, it can be doable, but the effort is not minimal and thus there must be a business case for it first. For our customers in the finance world, the business case is easy to make and we create solutions for them. But they involve manual work -- as you have written yourself. For our customers in the margin-sensitive automotive industry, it's a much harder issue. Fixed infrastructure costs have to be cut by 60%, to free money for new development. New deployments must not introduce additional regular manual work without lots of approvals. Welcome to the new world of autonomous computing where systems are supposed to `heal' themselves. ;-)
For the record: I'm not interested in catching people because they `skipped work' or whatever they are doing outside. IMO, this is a matter for their supervisor -- any supervisor who doesn't recognize that his staff isn't working on their assignments isn't worth his salary anyhow and will be cheated on. Neither I'm interested in outbound connections -- there are lots of possibilities to get data out of house. I'm really worried about reverse tunneling, where people connect from the outside back into the Intranet, bypassing all security checks.
An example case: I had the case of a sysadmin who automatically connected every 15 minutes to his home machine, enabling himself to log in back to his work system via reverse tunneling. It was `to be able to check for problems'. He didn't want to use the available VPN solution (CP SecureClient) because we forbid routing on the VPN client side and he wanted arbitrary routing into his home network. (And thus with two hops from the Internet into the company backbone...) If it wouldn't have been due to the regularity -- i.e., if he would have used a more irregular connection pattern -- and if it wouldn't have been a seperately protected and checked department network; we wouldn't have recognized him for a long time.
Enough rambling, have to get back to work now.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Where "Censorware" comes in handy is in taking the destination IP address of that CONNECT message and telling you the classification/reputation of that hostname or IP address -- is that an online banking firm, a "proxy avoidance" tunnel service, or a porn site?
Yeah, that's a real issue. Of course we see more incidents of that with services like GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, or "WebEx Remote Support" than with smart insiders setting up their own tunnels... I feed proxy logs through a set of custom perl scripts which report on the top resources users, including inbound/outbound/session count/duration and the like, but not timing patterns like this... yet.If you want to discuss this further, feel free to email, the address given in my profile is valid.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.