20% Time Needs a Clear Definition about readme HOT 9 CLOSED

Follow-up: I spoke with Fatma today and she's going to look into getting this defined.

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As shared in dB's Engineering Biweekly newsletter, the 20% definition is here:
https://www.notion.so/artsy/20-time-fb501b4da22f4af9acf1826c0a34ab6b We're still working on a better name. Thanks again everyone!

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Related: https://github.com/artsy/potential/issues/146

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We have two things here.

• Small improvements and bug fixes that we already do as part of the normal development process. I believe an Engineer can today raise a work item that is, for example, pure technical debt, into this process via their tech lead and it gets backlogged and prioritized within this framework as anything else. Note that we always want to have time for things like this. The product team has a workitem to clarify this whole thing and write it as part of PM's responsibilities, I believe.

• True 20% time as in do whatever you (an engineer) want that you think contributes to the business. We currently don't do that. At other companies (eg. Google), 20% time often requires a sponsor, so that could be a way to do this.

I propose we narrow this RFC down to (2).

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@dblock I don't quite agree – while both of those are important, I think we should accept this RFC as "we need to ask Product for a definition of 20% time" (1) while also finding a structure for (2). In fact, we already have accepted an RFC for (2) but putting into practice has been challenging: https://github.com/artsy/potential/issues/146 I'll follow-up with the Product team about this RFC to get a good definition of 20% time, and I'll talk to Joey about what we can work on together to get (2) addressed 👍

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To be clear, while feedback from engineers about https://github.com/artsy/potential/issues/146 was positive, I was unsuccessful at getting it adopted among our collaborators. After off-site (where "creating safe opportunities to experiment and fail" was an explicit theme), we resolved to experiment with it again in a limited way within the Platform team.

I personally think some longer-outlook/experimental work is appropriate for most engineering teams to protect some time for, but it's always been separate from the 20% introduced by Product and being discussed here.

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Resolution

We decided we need a definition.

Level of Support

3: Majority acceptance, with conflicting feedback.

Additional Context:

20% is definitely different from longer-outlook/experimental engineering work, which is being experimented with on the Platform team.

Next Steps

I'm meeting with Fatma on Friday to catch up, I'll ask her to give clarity to the PDDE org.

Exceptions

None.

from readme.

I will follow up with Fatma on this one she's back in the office. I would image with the PMs being short-handed that it might not be something they've resolved yet, but I'll ask.

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Still following up with Fatma – as you might imagine, this is a busy time of year for budgets and things, but recent questions from new engineers during sprint planning have reiterated the need for clarity around 20% time.

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