A few years later, you will have a totally burned team, half of them in the middle of a divorce because the family had no vacations for years.
A better idea is to give them double leave time, so you can get more and smarter people working in the project. The same people can choose between this project and working in a 4-day-work-week company, for more money.
But actually, a more efferent use of the resources would give the team a lot of auxiliary support, so they don't have to deal with the invoice system of the university and the providers, they don't have to care about how to install the heating/air conditioning, they have some money to hire a mechanical technician to help with the design of the system, and a lot of small things that waste a lot of time.
(I work in a University and sometime I weep when I read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html or http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio... .)
There are people who suffer because this technology either doesn't exist yet or is unavailable in their area...therefore the progress of this technology needs to sped up. As a joke I'm saying that all the leave should be cancelled for these engineers until the technology is available to the people who need it.
There are 7 billion people on the planet. Most don't go to college. Heck, even of those who do, most don't work on anything interesting. The real trick is to get a lot more people working on problems that matter.
"The real trick is to get a lot more people working on problems that matter." In other words, we can rely on a few people doing important work or we could get more people in the "game." There will be plenty of time off for everyone
A better idea is to give them double leave time, so you can get more and smarter people working in the project. The same people can choose between this project and working in a 4-day-work-week company, for more money.
But actually, a more efferent use of the resources would give the team a lot of auxiliary support, so they don't have to deal with the invoice system of the university and the providers, they don't have to care about how to install the heating/air conditioning, they have some money to hire a mechanical technician to help with the design of the system, and a lot of small things that waste a lot of time. (I work in a University and sometime I weep when I read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html or http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio... .)