Or, if you work at Google, push for a new chat app. It’ll probably be approved.
The manager was sharing how challenging it was for his team to debug a certain type of code that they were responsible for. Without missing a beat, this very senior leader replied: "What do we need in order to make it fun? What kind of tooling or other improvements would make it enjoyable and easy?".
I'm paraphrasing because I can't recall the exact words, but I was flabbergasted to hear how he framed the problem as a lack of "fun".
Interactions like that are why I left NVidia with enormous respect for their managers and not just the very bright individual contributors I had the privilege to meet.
I bet people who have been on the inside can guess who the very senior guy was. Absolute legend.
Um, you're being sarcastic yeah? (just checking) ;)
But there are also many workplaces that are more human, and run by people who you can build a psychological trust and rapport with. In those cases, there are opportunities to propose improvements, or push for pauses in feature work for support work. It’s not every day, and you can’t always change everywhere, but often management is receptive if you can sell it. This is how you start to build greater autonomy and a bit of fun into the workplace.
It takes a certain level of trust, but starting with tasks that vaguely fit the below tend to work well - start with something focused clearly on the business, not your own person feature ideas.
“Debugging/deploying/verbing situation X takes 0.5 man-sprints every sprint (across the team). If we can spend 2 sprints with 2 engineers to do X, we can cut this down to 0… during [time of year, eh holidays], our feature work slows down because people often take vacation. Can person and I work on this?”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2017/09/05/amd-ry...
ftfy
My current employer, Google, seems particularly amenable to internal entrepreneurship. After all, they're essentially paying you not to create new external businesses.
