I would say the title is a good spark for the discussion. In general I do believe 20% does work. But I also experienced some cases where it brought more harm than good.
E.g. migrating services from company's main language (Java), to something more exotic (Go, Node - where there was literally single engineer in the entire organization knowing these). Or adding background sync service to the product where offline database doesn't make any sense because data must be always up to date. Or adding some machine learning pipeline which processed wrong data and produced wrong outputs presented to cusomers (fixing it took months).
These are singular cases, but because they were unsupervised and no one cared what engineers did in their "20% time", they actually generated quite a lot of chaos and harm.
Yeah, the credit for the presentations goes to Mirek, the blame for the misleading title to myself :)
It should have been something like '20% for tech debt' won't solve all your problems.
I would say the title is a good spark for the discussion. In general I do believe 20% does work. But I also experienced some cases where it brought more harm than good.
E.g. migrating services from company's main language (Java), to something more exotic (Go, Node - where there was literally single engineer in the entire organization knowing these). Or adding background sync service to the product where offline database doesn't make any sense because data must be always up to date. Or adding some machine learning pipeline which processed wrong data and produced wrong outputs presented to cusomers (fixing it took months).
These are singular cases, but because they were unsupervised and no one cared what engineers did in their "20% time", they actually generated quite a lot of chaos and harm.