The Case for Letting Developers Tinker Again
There was a period when the tech industry loudly championed the idea of dedicated side project time — a sanctioned slice of the workweek for employees to pursue their own interests. Google’s famous “20% time” was the poster child. Somewhere along the way, that enthusiasm seems to have cooled as efficiency became the dominant corporate mantra. That retreat is a mistake.
The uncomfortable truth is that optimization does not produce originality. Squeezing every hour for maximum output leaves no room for the kind of unplanned exploration that yields genuinely new ideas. Quality solutions and creative breakthroughs require space to breathe. Side project time is not a luxury; it is a channel for exactly that kind of thinking.
What Side Project Time Actually Looks Like
The practice goes by many names — at the Guardian it is called “10% time,” for example — but the underlying premise is consistent: employees are given dedicated hours during the workday to work on projects they choose, to learn independently, or to develop skills outside their day-to-day responsibilities.
Google’s founders were among the most prominent advocates when they made the case in their 2004 IPO letter:
“We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner. For example, AdSense for content and Google News were both prototyped in ‘20% time.’ Most risky projects fizzle, often teaching us something. Others succeed and become attractive businesses.”
— Larry Page and Sergey Brin
How thoroughly Google still honors that commitment two decades later is unclear, and the practice has not become as widespread as it once threatened to be. Still, the idea has never fully disappeared, and it remains worth defending on several fronts.
What It Offers the Individual
For employees, side project time is a rare opportunity to follow curiosity wherever it leads. Regular job duties may or may not foster skill development, but they rarely offer the freedom to explore unrelated territory. Side project time fills that gap, opening avenues for growth that the daily grind simply does not provide.
It is also a chance to step back from constant activity. There is a lesson from zen philosophy that applies directly to pet project maintenance: sometimes the most productive thing to do is nothing at all. The fog of constant busyness can obscure better solutions to persistent problems. Side project time creates the mental clarity that employees carry back into their regular work.
What It Offers the Company
The corporate case for side project time is less obvious but arguably just as strong. Consider Pixar’s approach, as articulated by co-founder Ed Catmull, who spoke about the need to protect “ugly babies” — the rough, unformed ideas that are easy to dismiss before they have had a chance to develop:
“A new thing is hard to define; it’s not attractive, and it requires protection. When I was a researcher at DARPA, I had protection for what was ill-defined. Every new idea in any field needs protection. Pixar is set up to protect our director’s ugly baby.”
— Ed Catmull
That philosophy has deep roots. Bell Labs, which earned ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards, operated on a similar long-term view. As journalist Jon Gertner summarized in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation:
“It is now received wisdom that innovation and competitiveness are closely linked. But Bell Labs’ history demonstrates that the truth is actually far more complicated…creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting new insights than are the forces of competition.”
— Jon Gertner
The patience there was remarkable. One employee recalled the prevailing attitude: “When I first came, there was the philosophy: look, what you’re doing might not be important for ten years or twenty years, but that’s fine, we’ll be there then.”
One could dismiss side project time as a thinly disguised substitute for corporate R&D funding, but that framing misses the point. It fosters an integrated culture where innovation is not quarantined in a separate department. And even from a purely self-interested employer perspective, the payoff is clear: happier, more knowledgeable employees, lower turnover, and occasionally an unexpected new product. Side project time is a slow-burning investment, but one that cultivates the conditions for brilliant ideas to emerge.
