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"Itโs funny, people have been asking me since I got here, 'When is Yahoo going to have 20% time?'" she said on stage during an all-employee meeting at Yahoo.ย "Iโve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Googleโs 20% time. Itโs really 120% time."
"It's not technically something that gets formal management oversight โ Googlers aren't forced to work on additional projects and there are no written guidelines about it. Typically, employees who have an idea separate from their regular jobs will focus 5 or 10% of their time on it, until starts to "demonstrate impact." At that point, it will take up more of their time and more volunteers will join, until it becomes a real project." [attributed to "Google HR boss Laszlo Bock"]
Interesting final quote from Bock: "[The informal 20% time policy] operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management oversight, and always will, because the most talented and creative people can't be forced to work."
The interesting lesson is that you win when you convince your employee to produce more work. Maybe 20% time isn't such a bad idea for either side of the management fence. X hours of required work versus 1.2X of work the employee actively wants to give. Sounds like a win-win.
Putting my new podcast feed management app on the Windows store.
Making a website for the podcast app.
Figuring out how to post to Blogger & Wordpress from C#.
Mostly just OAuth fun.
Figuring out ufw and complete my Linux box install at Linode.
Move over my company webpages from the current host I've used for a little too long (webhost4life).
Applying for a few more contracts to fill back up the proverbial work pipeline.
That's all for now, I think. /sigh
Ever overcommitted? This time, I've got nobody to blame but myself. The problem, of course, is that I've got all of these well started, which means I probably could've finished the top two or three in the same amount of time as the nothing-finished state they're in now. And that's the real lesson: You have to finish what you start before starting something new if you want to get things done as efficiently as possible.
Why is finishing something now more efficient than working in parallel and finishing it all at the same future time Y? Well, take the CamStudio work: I wanted to finish the MarkUpDown video before I really started advertising. Let's face it -- a Window 10 app, even though it seems fairly cutting edge-ish now, has a limited shelf life. Assuming there's much money to make, I'm losing money by not advertising now. Sales today should compound sales tomorrow. I'm wasting my asset.
Finishing Task A at time X rather than end time Y means you get from X to Y as extra time to benefit from Task A's work. Clear?
If you have a contractor who is billing you for more than 45 hours a week and pretends that they have a life, any life, be nervous, very nervous.
I'm having a hard time billing for things that aren't obviously work (so I'm not). Some I worry about are no-brainers: eating, exercising, travel. Some aren't: Hardware troubleshooting, quick web surfing to take a break before diving back in, blogging about something you learned while working, or working on your own related-but-open source and public projects.
I certainly spent a lot of time troubleshooting hardware in other jobs, but that was hardware that was provided by the company. If they didn't feel like paying for better stuff and backup hardware for me to use while mine was being fixed, well, there's only so much I can do. (That said, I can and have done some stuff, like taking small, modular bits of work and setting them up on personal boxes while I was waiting if I had to.)
Also note when you're working alone, you have fewer built-in breaks. We might hate inefficient meetings, but one thing's for sure, you're ready to work when they're done. Or maybe you have a coworker who is bugging you with a question, and you're forced to get out of the zone. Or even just 20 seconds here and there for a few jokes. When you're a remote contractor, these interruptions that, strangely, also recharge you in many ways, simply don't happen.
Do you charge for the time you use to recharge that you were getting paid for (because they were culturally required) before? (To be clear, generally no, but I can see the argument for a reasonable amount it.)
Some things are closer to kosher, though, I think. I like to write reuseable libraries when there's not a great one for a project's specific use case, and experience tells me I'm going to spend more time shoehorning existing libraries to fit our need than it'd cost me to write something that zaps our needs with an ever-proverbial laser focus. But what do you do with that time? How much time do you have to spend on your own creating it before you can start charging to apply it to your current work? Isn't there some portion of the implementation that's billable?
And what about writing StackOverflow answers or blog posts about technical lessons you've learned while working? I've certainly benefited at jobs taking a second look at something I'd done months or years before, and I'm sure as heck benefiting from others taking the time, some of it work time, to answer SO questions "for" me. Isn't some portion of recording your on-the-job knowledge building billable?
Which is to say that I'd like to know what my contractor is billing me for, exactly, if s/he is billing for more than 45 hours and also seems to have a life. I know I have a good work ethic, if only because I've seen just enough folks at a number of workplaces to know, well, I'm no worse than average (I'm trying to stay modest here. You see how well that's working.)
If you figure 16 hours a day awake, 3/4 and hour for your morning routine (15.25), 1.5 more [total] for lunch and dinner (13.75), one driving (12.75), plus whatever "life" is -- two for evening wind-down and kids (10.75), half an hour writing a stupid blog entry (10.25), an hour or so with your SO (9.25-9.5)... we're already at just over nine left for errands, hobbies (like more programming, natch!), volunteering, and, oh yeah, billable work.
Nine times five is 45. If someone billing 45 isn't putting in weekend work and seems to have a life -- any life, like they're a member of a WoW guild, or talk more than once about going out with friends, or watch a weekday sport, or listen to podcasts -- be suspicious. Be very suspicious. ;^)
Obviously an oversimplification, but not by much. One of the common refrains I hear from folks who do indie dev is that they grow their side apps to a certain income level before they leave their 9-to-5 (or 7-to-7 or what-have-you). That's smart, of course. But it helps if your app ideas are reasonably-sized, and your outside commitments are reasonably small, and if you're able to hit big on your reasonably-sized app. That sounds smart and safe, right?
But those same constraints from the half-empty perspective are this: You can grow your important project into a living if your idea is small, you don't have a life, and you get really lucky.
I just blogged when I hit these quotes, but Coudal's point is, apparently, if you're not committed to your project, you're really not that serious. If it's a great idea, sell out. Doing things "in six months" or after you get something sustainable in your spare time shows (all practicalities aside for the moment) that you're afraid.
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