Yes! I would be really surprised if an organisation didn't expect that to happen!
When solving pretty much any problem that I don't have an existing cookie-cutter solution for, I do some prototyping as part of the process of figuring out how it works. Sometimes I do this for arbitrary things that are irritating me, or that I think might be worth looking at.
Nobody is sitting over my shoulder looking at everything I do and I'd be right out the door if that was ever the case. I'd expect professional software engineers to spend at least a bit of their time working on this sort of stuff!
> When solving pretty much any problem that I don't have an existing cookie-cutter solution for, I do some prototyping as part of the process of figuring out how it works. Sometimes I do this for arbitrary things that are irritating me, or that I think might be worth looking at.
Well, of course this is how normal development works. This is the work I am talking about that would _not_ get done because the OP was working on a prototype to solve some _other_ problem.
When solving pretty much any problem that I don't have an existing cookie-cutter solution for, I do some prototyping as part of the process of figuring out how it works. Sometimes I do this for arbitrary things that are irritating me, or that I think might be worth looking at.
Nobody is sitting over my shoulder looking at everything I do and I'd be right out the door if that was ever the case. I'd expect professional software engineers to spend at least a bit of their time working on this sort of stuff!