Employee Hackathons

Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on non-core projects which might lead to future gains for Google. While the idea is interesting, but not many employers would be comfortable with letting their engineers run wild for that much time. So, people behind Atlassian and those behind Jotspot adopted a modification to the idea.

The idea is to have a Hackathlon - a day long event where the engineers each crank on something:

• valuable to the company
• but not what they’re supposed to be working on and
• that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day

By having such an event, not only do you have an opportunity to see exciting, and potentially useful ideas being developed, but most importantly you prevent the creativity from being stalled.

Check out Jotspot Hackathalon and Atlassian's FedEx day.