There’s a NY Times article on Google’s “20% time” that gives engineers time to work on their own projects that they’re interested in, other than working on their day-to-day projects.

Here’s some key points taken from the article:

1. “People work better when they’re involved in something they’re passionate about, and many cool technologies have their origins in 20 percent time.”

2. When people are interested in the same thing, they will self-organize (a pinciple of agile process).

3. “If you have a great technical idea, you don’t have your V.P. send out a memo telling everybody to use it. Instead, you take it to your fellow engineers and convince them that it’s good. Good ideas spread fast, and this approach keeps us from making technical mistakes. But it also means that the burden falls upon you to spread your idea.

4. “When you give engineers the chance to apply their passion to their company, they can do amazing things.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Software Development, UnderpaidLoveMonki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.