The 20% solution

Right before I left the day job I talked to the Engineering Manager about what I'd do if I were king of the forest. One of the things I referenced was the Google 20%. Basically, as I understand it, Google folk get to spend 20% of their time on personal projects. I have no idea what the constraint is, I assume you can't develop petunia growing technology, but if it's in the information arena, I assume you could do it.

I proposed to the EM that my fellow engineers were a bright bunch, knew the application they were working on very well and would love to fix the most glaring holes, or maybe add some nice new feature. The powers-that-be would have no obligation to use what the drones came up with, but how cool would be to encourage staff to think creatively about the problem in front of them.

Fast forward four months, and Google releases a chart api.



If you're doing any kind of reporting you can now add charting - free and easy. It's absolutely beautiful. I've got uses for it right now.

And it was developed in someone's 20% time.