[deklerk]

I imagine it's not appropriate for startups, since they're burning money fast and mental health appppears to be less of a priority? I've not worked at one, so hard to say.

Besides startups, I think it's fair play at companies of all sizes. Employees are the most important thing to companies, and the overhead of losing trained, context-carrying talent tends to be heavy. So, why not let them fulfill that scratch and keep them at your company.

I've seen some companies allow 20% on any team within the company (rather than any project whatsoever): that could be a nice middleground for a company that is unsure about the whole thing.

[kk__]

Twitch was basically a 20% project at justin.tv.

Let smart people do what they want.

[paulryanrogers]

Survivorship bias could be at play. I'm a fan of 20% time. Though I think we'd need more data than some anecdotes to draw broad conclusions.

[kergonath]

It can be good for your engineers’ sanity even if it does not end up a unicorn, though.

[kd5bjo]

Not really; the consensus view within the company was that the justin.tv website wasn’t long-term sustainable and the company needed a narrower focus.

There were three segments with sizeable viewer counts at the time: sports, video games, and social streams. The people streaming sports probably didn’t have the necessary permission from the copyright holders, so that was only possible through the DMCA safe-harbor provisions; obtaining the rights ourselves didn’t appear to be a viable option.

The entire company basically split into two divisions: the social division turned into SocialCam, which had some moderate success, and the gaming division turned into Twitch.

[javier2]

Wow, that is a great insight of them. Usually my managers want to do MORE disparate things, and spread more thinly. It's nearly impossible to get them to cut anything and focus on a mission.

[dontTango]

At my last Engineering job, I would spend slow time working on job automation.

That was until my boss flipped his shit one day and wanted me to memorize a bunch of shit in my down time.

So instead of automating 6 figure Engineering jobs, I did what everyone else does on their slow Time. Facebook!

[wolco2]

Those 20% at a startup can be where one fixes everything they wanted to but was never given the time.

It's impossible at a company if you haven't built your main product yet so I'm not sure how it could work at a startup.

[outside1234]

I would describe a startup as one big 20% project :)