Lots of comments on the effectiveness of a 20% policy - I'm curious what other folks experience is like with an internal hack day? It seems that if a company's culture isn't suitable for 20% time (for whatever reason), that an internal hack day might be a useful alternative (scratching developer itches but not "wasting" 20% of developer time on non-core projects). Any insight/recommendations from anyone who's done this?
We do an internal hack day modeled after Atlassian ShipIt (or as they called it and we do 'Fedex Day'). We've only had two since we started (year and a half) but aim to have one per quarter or every other quarter.
In our experience, they were a major boost to morale and some really interesting ideas came out of them, several of which have been implemented fully in our core products.
I'm a big advocate for these. We couldn't really pull off 20% but giving developers opportunities to work on their ideas within the company is really important.
