

Twitter Employees Get Google’s 20% Time… For The Entire Next Week - adamhowell
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/22/twitter-hack-week/

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thwarted
The iPad/Arduino powered Kegmate at Yelp[1] is the result of a Hackathon,
which are regularly scheduled. The most recent one was expanded to two days
because we found that one day just wasn't enough. It's a lot of fun and many
people work straight through to power through implementing their ideas. A lot
of interesting, good things have come out of these events. You can work on
_anything_ , you need to present it to all the other engineers at the end, and
we encourage you to work with people from other teams that you might not
normally get a chance to work with. For weeks before hand, people are coming
up with ideas, drumming up support/finding other people who are interested in
the same idea to work with, and judging effort to make sure they are working
on something can be demoable at the end. I got a chance to get involved with
doing some embedded development, which I'm interested in but don't normally
get a chance to work on.

There's been a lot of fun things, and a lot of productive things. From Kegmate
to a MUD that simulated the office environment to unexpected reporting tools
that help out other departments.

[1] [http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/08/yelp-makes-beer-
more...](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2010/08/yelp-makes-beer-more-
fun.html) (previously posted on hacker news)

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alexyoung
Can you spend your Twitter/Google 20% time doing something non-technical that
matters to you or your community? Like helping out a local charity, drinking
beer, or gardening for your disabled neighbour?

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lutorm
I don't work at Google, but when I interviewed there I asked a similar
question and they said something like "your supervisor should be consulted
about what you work on". So I bet not.

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InclinedPlane
Note that one week a year is actually... 2% time. A full 20% would work out to
about 2 and a third months a year. Regular "hack" time and private project
time is good, but 20% time is so quantitatively different that it's
fundamentally qualitatively different as well.

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bdr
Having everybody do it simultaneously seems like a good way to avoid the
problem at Google where 20% time has become known as "120% time".

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psyklic
Except this is probably worse - there is an end-of-the-week show and tell!
Engineers always come up with very cool yet non-trivial ideas. And as with
almost all software projects, the last few days before show and tell will be
crunch time - either to simply get it running, or to add those last few cool
features.

