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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!
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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
..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 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.
Sounds like most people would spend it drinking beer.
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 worth it.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Just as a company can't give "creative time" to their people and expect dramatic results.
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.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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....
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.
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/