I'm not and never was a Googler but at Atlassian we the same policy of 20% time and I really do think it was super valuable. There are a certain number of developers who will muck around and waste their 20% time and there are certain (terrible) team leads and PMs who discourage the use of the time because they're anxious about their own projects.
But for the most part it contributed massively to the happiness of the developers. And the outcomes, in my opinion, were invaluable. It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by developers who were invested in solving their own productivity problems.
The quintessential "20% project" is GMail but I think that misses the incrementalism that 20% projects really provide. Developers will absolutely take advantage of the time to improve their personal ergonomics, and everyone around them benefits from that.
> It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by developers who were invested in solving their own productivity problems.
Can we get some of that same love put into the actual business products?
I no longer work at Atlassian but I spent my last year working on a Jira frontend refresh that no customer ever asked for and few considered an improvement. So..... no? Haha sorry.
Another Atlassian here... I'll vouch for everything here, but I'll add on one thing.
> It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by developers who were invested in solving their own productivity problems.
The flip side of this is that we have countless nonfunctional tools because the core maintainer has either left the company, switched to another project, or simply does not have the time to adequately adapt to new user/company requirements.
We do a great job encouraging innovation through 20% time, but we don't seem to be great at supporting these projects past the initial "hack it together" stage. The process can still be incredibly rewarding, but it is not without some shortcomings.
I wonder if any other companies implementing 20% time experience similar problems.
Honestly I wouldn’t agree to have 100% of my effort dictated by others. I never had a visa situation but even as a fresh out of college worker, I demanded a portion of autonomy. I wouldn’t be fulfilling what I could do for my employer otherwise. I get odd looks for some of the things I get enthusiastic but some of them work out. And I learn a lot more about things and in particularly the growth of new things from being fully responsible for some things. If you are a smart person who can code, you absolutely have the labor market power to take partial control of your time and effort. I would say you have an obligation as a thinking worker to cultivate yourself in this way, for the benefit of yourself, your coworkers, and your employer.
I think I'm also in the same bucket as the original comment so can answer from my perspective.
Coding is my hobby as well so spend pretty much most of my time awake working on something whether it's for the company, freelance or personal projects that interest me.
It's quite common that I'll discover something or gain relevant experience that I can reapply to projects in and outside of my 9-6.
There's a list of things we want in JIRA that I'll work through and if someone says that something is important then I'll absolutely work on it but quite often I'll get random ideas of features or improvements and just go straight ahead working on it because I know it'll improve what we have or is valuable to the product.
The project manager kind of hates me and asks how I decide what to work on and what my schedule looks like but it's mostly spur of the moment problems I'm excited to solve.
Sure I'm able to do what I want but I still stay on course somewhat and it's all valuable.
I've had a case where I did this when getting paid hourly. They told me it's not what they're paying me for so it probably only applies when it's on a salary or rev share basis :D
I wish my company did this, it would give me time to flesh out all those ideas that I have as I do my regular job, but "we don't have time for that" that I refuse to take home with me :) 8-9 hours of coding a day is enough for me. I actually worked on an automation system (mostly on my own time) that literally reduced the "manual human intervention time" to an 8:1 ratio. I'll admit it was rough first and I estimated it would take me time to train a typical technician a day or two to wrap their head around it but it could be done (I actually trained one tech on it during an all-nighter demo to him, and he loved it). Anyway fast forward a bit, I presented it to my manager and his manager and he said "we don't time to train techs on that, we have to get work done" and I had already trained 1 tech on it, and we did it on our on time! I was so dejected after that that I left the company about a month later and was much happier.
From what I understand, 20% at Atlassian is more like: spend every Friday doing whatever you think is most important/interesting. That's quite different from my experience of 20% time at Google, which tends to require explicit manager approval.
But for the most part it contributed massively to the happiness of the developers. And the outcomes, in my opinion, were invaluable. It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by developers who were invested in solving their own productivity problems.
The quintessential "20% project" is GMail but I think that misses the incrementalism that 20% projects really provide. Developers will absolutely take advantage of the time to improve their personal ergonomics, and everyone around them benefits from that.
But this is obviously very difficult to measure.