Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Atlassian's overnight FedEx Days
FedEx Days
Engineers use the day to write a cool patch for code or an elegant hack. At the end, they present everything they built to their teammates and the rest of the company in a wild and woolly all-hands meeting, and since the company is Australian, everybody has a beer. The company calls them FedEx Days, because you have to deliver something overnight.
That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.
Twenty percent time
Atlassian took the idea further with 20% time, the arrangement Google is famous for, where engineers spend 20% of their time on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, and their technique. At Google, about half of the new products in a typical year are born during that 20% time, including Gmail, Orkut, and Google News.
Where did Google's 20% time come from?
The idea is older than Google. The manufacturer 3M had a policy, dating to the William McKnight era in the 1940s, that let technical staff spend about 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing. Chemist Art Fry used that kind of freedom to develop Post-it Notes, which went on sale nationally in 1980. Google's founders described 20% time in the letter that accompanied the company's 2004 stock offering.
How did Gmail start as a side project?
Paul Buchheit began building the first version of Gmail in 2001, years before the public saw it. Google opened Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004, with one gigabyte of storage per user. Competing free email services at the time offered only a few megabytes. Many people assumed the announcement was an April Fools' joke because of that gap.
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