Most time in our lives we spent working. A lot of people complain about their work. What is wrong with this picture? They forgot the most important thing in live: fun. Simple, plain old fun. They get annoyed by colleagues, bosses, managers, customers and start complaining. The worst thing about that is that complaining is that it works just like a virus, it spreads, infecting all other people on the work floor. The working atmosphere will get to sub zero in no time. Some will stay at their jobs because they don't dare leaving. Some flee and find a new team to infect and some, a few ones, will try to lighten up and try to get other colleagues back on track. Don't ever count on having those in your team, if you are lucky, there is one, but that's a rare occasion.
Working without fun is demotivating. Working and having fun while doing it, works in multiple ways. First of all, people having fun will excell. Second they tend to get more work done, third they will get the most out themselves and try to accomplish the same for the team.
How can we make development more fun? Most developers can tell you the answer right away; give me some time for myself to make something cool or fix something that is bothering me. A lot of big companies have done this already in different formats: some with a couple of hours per week, a weekend once every couple of months or a day per month. My guess is that about 5% of work time should at least be dedicated to fun stuff. Using this approach I made some nice achievements with my teams from translation modules to reducing technical debt to creating AI's which solve puzzles. Not everything is always work related, but it seems to me that most developers want to fix things that annoy them or increase there knowledge, anyway it's a win for the company.
When a fun day is planned, it will affect the work planning, there is at least eight hours less time per team member to create feature increments, calculate the impact on the velocity and demo the work that has been done on the fun day.
How can we make development more fun? Most developers can tell you the answer right away; give me some time for myself to make something cool or fix something that is bothering me. A lot of big companies have done this already in different formats: some with a couple of hours per week, a weekend once every couple of months or a day per month. My guess is that about 5% of work time should at least be dedicated to fun stuff. Using this approach I made some nice achievements with my teams from translation modules to reducing technical debt to creating AI's which solve puzzles. Not everything is always work related, but it seems to me that most developers want to fix things that annoy them or increase there knowledge, anyway it's a win for the company.
When a fun day is planned, it will affect the work planning, there is at least eight hours less time per team member to create feature increments, calculate the impact on the velocity and demo the work that has been done on the fun day.
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