Hack Day...
I just read an article on a new concept that high-tech employers are using to help motivate their employees. It's called 'Hack Day' - a day where employees are encouraged to come to work in casual clothing, fed snacks and soft-drinks and are encouraged to 'create' with reckless abandon. The creating doesn't even have to necessarily have anything to do with their business, it's a chance to get your brain working, maybe get a little imagination and enthusiasm going, and generally encourage people to sharpen their skills in programming (or whatever strengths they have). I would LOVE such a day - there are countless programs I've been wanting to write for our office, like a defect tracking system, where our bugs and fixes could be logged and tracked in a database and reported on. It would replace our existing tool that has a lot of limits that make our jobs just that much more tedious to do. Problem is, I don't have time to work on it and even if I wanted to work on it between tasks, I get so wrapped up in these things when I start them, that everything else would become a frustrating deviation from the interesting work I'm trying to do. My boss probably wouldn't love that... ;)
I just read an article on a new concept that high-tech employers are using to help motivate their employees. It's called 'Hack Day' - a day where employees are encouraged to come to work in casual clothing, fed snacks and soft-drinks and are encouraged to 'create' with reckless abandon. The creating doesn't even have to necessarily have anything to do with their business, it's a chance to get your brain working, maybe get a little imagination and enthusiasm going, and generally encourage people to sharpen their skills in programming (or whatever strengths they have). I would LOVE such a day - there are countless programs I've been wanting to write for our office, like a defect tracking system, where our bugs and fixes could be logged and tracked in a database and reported on. It would replace our existing tool that has a lot of limits that make our jobs just that much more tedious to do. Problem is, I don't have time to work on it and even if I wanted to work on it between tasks, I get so wrapped up in these things when I start them, that everything else would become a frustrating deviation from the interesting work I'm trying to do. My boss probably wouldn't love that... ;)
The article mentioned examples like building an application that would notify you every time new music was available for download to your iPod, or building a time forecasting system to predict and track how long it takes your company to complete a task. These things may never actually be used for business-purposes, or maybe they would be, but all in all, it would allow people to take the time to expand an idea and really run with it, while learning new valuable programming skills at the same time.
Of course, here at the gov't, it's a very different environment, I'd go as far as to say it's not a highly motivational environment compared to private industry where your productivity DIRECTLY impacts your bottom line. Here, there are too many layers of bureaucracy and red tape to allow you to do anything like a 'hack day' and honestly, people probably don't care as much because the person managing the budget is more than likely not the person who is doling out the work (hence the reason why a lot of work is forgotten about). Anyway, I thought it was a neat concept. I think my dream job would be one where I could bring my pet to work (to keep him in a 'doggie daycare' style facility as some companies are now doing), and where every Monday could be a hack day. ;) Then I'd be a happy girl.
Of course, here at the gov't, it's a very different environment, I'd go as far as to say it's not a highly motivational environment compared to private industry where your productivity DIRECTLY impacts your bottom line. Here, there are too many layers of bureaucracy and red tape to allow you to do anything like a 'hack day' and honestly, people probably don't care as much because the person managing the budget is more than likely not the person who is doling out the work (hence the reason why a lot of work is forgotten about). Anyway, I thought it was a neat concept. I think my dream job would be one where I could bring my pet to work (to keep him in a 'doggie daycare' style facility as some companies are now doing), and where every Monday could be a hack day. ;) Then I'd be a happy girl.
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