Post

Hello, I wrote a new talk that is ultimately about how misery is a dumb strategy egoless.engineering

I'm curious about the idea of slack in the system. Can you quantify or add more detail about how hard people are pushing in high performance scenarios?

"20% time" might have bad branding with other teams, e.g. the original Google thing may have been conflated with the idea of engineers shipping features or whole products on their own. I have occasionally called it "19% time" to drop the hint that this is not that.

You also want to make an intentional choice about what percentage of the whole team is devoted to tool sharpening, paying down debts, etc. In the really hellish rebuilding years I alluded to in the talk we were doing 60% progress on product work, 40% trying to get ahead of the scaling curve.

None of this works if you aren't measuring how often people do their bootcamps, take slack time, and treating slippage there as a bug to remediate. It's a goal like anything else.