One of my previous employers had the attitude "if you have time for side projects, there is always more to be done in our codebase." It didn't pan out well for them in the long run. Everyone had side projects, they just never talked about them for fear of the lame statement or the employer's IP paranoia.
Now at a place where developers openly talk about their projects, collaborate on them, and even talk with the CTO about them. Whether they have commercial intent or not. A few of my own little "it'd be nice if we had a tool for X" have actually been picked up, built upon, and used company wide.
Companies need to realize that devs hacking on side ideas or new technologies can end up helping them in the long run. Makes for happier devs, brings new ideas to the table, and creates a tighter culture.
Companies need to realize that devs hacking on side ideas or new technologies can end up helping them in the long run. Makes for happier devs, brings new ideas to the table, and creates a tighter culture.
This is one of those things that I think is only true at small companies. Places like Google have tried and largely failed at this. I wouldn't be surprised if Page completely ends 20% time since pretty much everyone I know personally at Google says that it became a way to do spin your wheels, but provide no value.
At a small company, you're still figuring out how to make money. It's just as likely that your next revenue stream will come from out of the blue.
With that said, as an employee, I'd never give my employer any of my side project's IP. They can license it or buy it, but it's mine.
I'd focus more on very carefully designed incentives for building cool stuff during 20% time--bonuses and standard recognition/awards certainly wouldn't work; I'm not sure what would.
"Programmer productivity is not impacted by number of hours; it’s impacted by the quality of those hours"
Truer words have not been spoken. Some companies really don't understand this and are always watching the clock, or making sure you are pushing out a certain amount of code.
Sometimes I need to just sit there and think instead of typing.
I truly hope this works out for them. It's great to be able to jump into something fun after hours of head down coding on something that may no be very interesing.
Best code I've written were always little tools for myself or team to use plus it keeps you sharp by allowing you to experiment with things you may never have tried with code meant to go into production.
This is really cool, last week when I got bored of having lunch at the same place, I decided to write an app that picks a place for me but then it kinda got sidetracked. This gave me enough push to do it as my weekend project.
This reminded me to put some more work into my lunch app (jQuery Mobile + Yelp API + Google Maps API) I've worked on a little bit for the same reason. Thanks :)
One of our awesome devs made a campfire bot too. It spits out a pivotal tracker ticket status, the weather, does a google image search among a few other things. I don't want to give away everything since I didn't build it.
One hack we're talking about is adding a bathroom occupied red light so we know not to get up and check if there's someone using it. Side projects are great.
We're pretty cool with it and most of the time if a dev spends the day working on a side project, they will stay a little late to do the other work they have.
Very cool! And if there's one company I admire, and would like to work for, it's GitHub.
This may also work for web-apps, btw. Let your users modify something about your web-app, or create something new, that is not just for them, and I'll bet they'll become much more invested (like wikipedia).
Now at a place where developers openly talk about their projects, collaborate on them, and even talk with the CTO about them. Whether they have commercial intent or not. A few of my own little "it'd be nice if we had a tool for X" have actually been picked up, built upon, and used company wide.
Companies need to realize that devs hacking on side ideas or new technologies can end up helping them in the long run. Makes for happier devs, brings new ideas to the table, and creates a tighter culture.