Workplace experiments: Four Point Someone
A lot of start-ups dream of having a technical team full of creative, rockstar software developers. But the problem is you just can’t buy creativity. Creative people require tools and environment which foster their success. Here at pagalguy, we are about to take one more step towards that kind of ideal environment. For the developers at pagalguy :-
1) Spend only 4 days (Mon-Thu) per week on developing products for PaGaLGuY.
2) Friday is a working day but you can spend the entire day on anyone of your side-projects (open source projects or your own product idea or anything).
3) If your side-project needs some resources like hosting etc or incase you want to turn it into a proper product we are glad to help you out with some much needed resources.
4) If you want to host some events like Devcamp etc or just invite some hackers to code and discuss your side-projects on sundays, we shall offer our office for such purposes and mostly sponsor pizza or something for food.
Honestly we are inspired by Google’s “work 20% of the time on your own project” principle. But we didn’t stop at that. we took few more steps to create an ecosystem around side-projects. we aren’t blindly following someone either, we did this because we truly believe in the importance of one’s own side projects.
Consider this, most of the hackers are those whose side projects ended up shaking the software world. Like David Heinemier Hanssen of Ruby on Rails fame, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and many more. One cannot deny the importance of their side-projects and the importance these hackers give to their side-projects in becoming who they are now.
To quote Chris of github fame ” You should always have a side project. Side projects give you an outlet, provide a useful distraction, let you explore new ideas, learn new concepts, and generally give you the freedom to be unaccountable. You don’t have to worry about your boss, or your coworkers, or the damn commentators on Reddit. Just have some fun. Treat yourself.”
“Work on your small project for a few Sundays, declare it complete then move on. Learn another language, or write something else in your new language. Pick up a new web framework or work on flashy effect number two. Add concurrent task execution to your Rake. The more acclimated you get to this process, the more creative your ideas will be. It’s the whole 10% inspiration 90% perspiration thing, and it worked for me. My plea to you today is to start a side project. Scratch your own itch. Be creative. Share something with the world, or keep it to yourself.”
We believe in becoming a place where you can work with the very best on the very best problems. We are now thinking about how this would work across content, graphics, marketers and others. To be innovative is to be leading from the front and this is just one the many more ways we intend to build a rockstar workplace.
So four days of work for PaGaLGuY and one day for yourself. That makes us want to call it the 4.1 Way of Working. Did we just coin a buzzword?
[...] and were wondering how we could be extending this to folks beyond the developing sphere. The PaGaLGuY.com Slog Blog Blog Archive Workplace experiments: Four Point Someone The text on our blog is below: — x — A lot of start-ups dream of having a technical team full [...]
lols, am forwarding this to my boss !
even we are pioneers – 7.1 concept
cool !
That is a great way of the making the workplace, a better place.. Keep up the good job! Cheers.
It really works great if there is support for side projects. Like one of my friends was recently complaining of no help from internet for medical science studies. Even google is not yet good enough for filtering search for medicine. It would be great if someone designed a great search engine especially for medical purposes. Hell, I could have done it if I had got someone at my back! But sadly, I am more occupied searching for a job
.Well, I do hope someone builds on this idea.