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Comment by jetti | Hacker News Reader

I definitely wasn't expecting that because Jason Fried didn't give his company a month off. Jason Fried just gave his company a new role for a month. People still had to show up to work and do work, it was just they could do whatever work they wanted.

For me personally, I wouldn't enjoy that month. The main reason would be purely selfish. I know that my idea and implementation could make money and instead of releasing it on my own and profiting, it would become property of the company. I would also feel pigeon-holed into working on stuff that the company already does or in the same realm (which in my case is Business Intelligence tools to work with Cognos) which, while interesting, is not where my interests lie which would also limit my creativity.

It should be interesting to see what comes out of 37Signals in the next 6 months to a year.

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I worked at a company that did something similar. We would have "research" sprints where we basically got to do whatever we wanted for a few weeks. It was a time we got to implement all of the crazy pipe dream features we'd been thinking of. We got to learn new technologies. We got to work with different people.

People also implemented their own ideas. When the sprint was over, if they wanted to keep working on it, all we had to do was fill out a form that our CTO would sign saying that the company didn't want the project.

I miss that part of the job.

Completely off topic, but pigeon toe is a developmental disease of the shin.

I think you mean pigeon holed.

Thanks, I did and I updated. :)

This reminds me of the article about Valve from a few weeks ago. They seem to take this type of approach all year round in which employees aren't shoehorned into specific roles and they are allowed freedom to work on the projects they want.

I can speak from experience that there is a lot that the team I work on would like to get done that gets trumped by management. Our first foray into this is an overnight hack-a-thon scheduled for next month. Not quite as creatively inspiring as a month long hack-a-thon.

Are you saying that the company you work for is OK with you doing non-work development tasks, but only if you do it on off-hours when you aren't being paid?

with you on that it was not a month off.

On the second part, I'd say you were not sure it would make money. If you were sure your idea would make money why didn't you do it. The exercise that 37Signals did was to provide a safety net for their team to experiment with wild ideas at the company's expense, the monthly paycheck. I'd take that deal any day.

True, I should have been more clear on that aspect. It would have the potential to make money for myself rather than the potential to make money for the company.

As an employee, I think it would be hard to get back into the rhythm of the day to day after a month like this. Similar to being on a really nice vacation.

In the article it sounds like they improved a lot of internal stuff, so perhaps they took the time to improve what they found as their biggest pain points in their day to day work. I do agree that my truest interests do not entirely align with what I'm doing at work.

Also, if I had a company and were to do this, I would implement a bonus system so that employees could receive additional compensation for putting forward their best ideas and efforts.

Very good point, it isn't always easy to work on tools or documents or cleaning things up when you are required to produce 'deliverables' at a certain pace

> Also, if I had a company and were to do this, I would implement a bonus system so that employees could receive additional compensation for putting forward their best ideas and efforts.

That's not a good idea. Look into extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards. You want people to put forward ideas and efforts because they actually address pain points, not because of a bonus they could get.

The important thing is they let everyone set priority in what they see as important and go do it, rather than priority dictated from top down which has led to the neglect of the badly needed internal tools. This is a very good management technique on delegation and empowerment.

That would be wonderful. I notice that a lot of people are really generous with bonuses for their imaginary companies. But people with actual companies are always kinda stingy. What's up with that?!

> I definitely wasn't expecting that because Jason Fried didn't give his company a month off. Jason Fried just gave his company a new role for a month.

Yeah, like a lot of other people, my expectation was that everyone got a month of paid, mandatory vacation. A month-long hackathon is a lot less interesting.

Perhaps. But it still is a lot more fun than doing the "same old" for that month.

It's not interesting from my perspective. It's a good idea. Many companies could benefit from it. Not Valve, but many companies.

What do you mean not Valve? Not Valve because they're already doing it every month of the year?

Yes.

From what I've read of the origins of Portal 2 (and I can't provide a link citation, it was in The Final Hours of Portal 2, a long form piece released as an ipad app), Valve did something very similar to this, all the employees went away to work on whatever ideas, came back and presented them. The coop model with two robots for Portal 2 came from that, as did a non-portals gameplay device that evidently got them excited enough to start building Portal 2 around, until they realised they couldn't do a Portal sequel that didn't have portals.

Except when you get back to that "same old" and now have to make up for the month that was lost!

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