10% Time At Work

As a web programmer, I work with the most fickle and ever-changing environments possible. Devices, languages, standards, aesthetics, best-practices, and browsers don’t sit still just because I’m not in school anymore.

But when I go home, I want to relax. Work out. Read a good book. Blog about how badly I want to write a good book.

You know. Stuff.

So while there are those dedicated programmers out there who scour industry news in their off-time, I (and other programmers like me) are likely to rest happily with the knowledge we have. We do our job and don’t really take the time to look into things like Node.js without some external impetus to do so.

10% Time

Well, now that our massive web project is underway, my work is re-instating 10% time.

What is 10% time, you may ask?

10% of the time I am on the clock at work, I should be learning.

Every Thursday afternoon, I am not only encouraged but required to stop working on whatever projects are currently on my plate and pick up some other technology-related project and tinker with it.

It doesn’t even have to be work-applicable. My job considers it important that we learn and hone our skills even if there’s no direct line that can be drawn between our learning and our job.

That is MIND-BLOWING to me.

They’re literally paying me to learn whatever I want as long as it’s tech-related.

Projects

I’m finally reading some of the design books I’ve been drooling over. I’m investigating gamification — what works and what doesn’t, ways that it can be incorporated into applications and even general life.

One of my coworkers is investigating building a fitbit for her dog. Another is playing around with iBeacons. A third is building a little device that will measure the salt levels in their water softener and send a text message when it needs to be refilled.

Learning

When I was in college? I was paying SO much for every class that I couldn’t afford to take extras. And when I swapped from Computer Science to Business Information Systems, I had to count Engineering Calculus II and Discrete Math and other such courses as electives because I’d already taken them and they didn’t apply to the BIS degree.

I didn’t have a lot of room for free-form exploration and learning.

10% time at work makes me feel … almost light-headed with the possibilities. I can learn anything I want. They’ll even pay for hardware if it’s not too expensive, like a rasperrypi or something along those lines.

Business

And I know this sounds frivolous and possibly insane on the part of my employer, but historically at this business? 10% time projects turn into some of the most wonderful and impressive aspects of our services.

While everyone knows that’s true, there’s still zero pressure to try and work on a project that will be business-applicable.

I hope more companies instate things like this, I really do.