Oops.
Tripped there.
Hi, there's a lot of you.
Okay!
Yes.
Hi, there.
My name is Kate.
A little bit about me.
Last year, I attended a coding boot camp here in London called Founders and Coders, and
now I work as a junior engineer at the Financial Times in product where we build tools to help
our colleagues across the FT work better and smarter to serve our customers, and I have
two beautiful guinea pigs!
Today, I want to share an idea with you in the ten minutes we have.
You might not agree with all of it, or any of it, but I love conferences like this.
Because you get introduced to so many new things.
And you can either take them home and act on them the next day, or you might mull over
some things a bit longer.
The idea I want to share with you today to mull over is ten per cent time.
It's not a new idea.
Some companies offer per cent time for their employees to work on side projects but I want
to talk about interesting concepts related to ten per cent time and offer observations
as a new developer and a little bit about my experience in the last few months at the
FT.
When I joined the Financial Times, and I was introduced to the concept of ten per cent
time, it was an unexpected perk.
I asked the principal engineer of internal product what she thought was the best way
to describe it, and she came up with, "10 per cent time is the way for people to learn
something that will help them grow and develop in a way that inspires them and in the way
they want to learn it."
It means you can work on side projects for a few hours a week unrelated to the team or
the FT at all, as long as it's with the purpose of redevelopment.
I loved this was going to be offered at my job because a large part of how I learned
programming at that point was making fun and sill y side projects both before when I was
going through Founders and coders.
Despite being new, it seemed to be the people who worked on side projects and did community
work and things like that in their extra time that progressed faster, and looking around,
it seems that working past your normal hours to increase your knowledge, or hack on things
that you want to because you don't have time at your job, or simply because you're passionate
about what you do, is common.
I think we can all recognise that side projects, big or small, contributing to open source,
planning meet-ups, giving conference talks or even just studying all the programming
material you can get your hands on outside of work, are always to grow your career faster
and accelerate your learning, especially for new developers.
But unfortunately this overload, while great if you can do it and sustain it, is also the
kind of thing that can lead to burn-out, and more than that, not everyone is able to devote
this time outside of work furthering their skills.
For example, people may have caring responsibilities whether for children, parents, partners, or
other dependents.
They might have mental or physical conditions like depression, anxiety, or other things
that make it difficult to find energy outside of work, or sometimes much less at all to
do things.
And there is any number of things that people might be dealing with that could prevent them
from devoting their free time to learning.
And I think this kind of learning and progress outside of work favours people who are over
represented in tech, people who are younger, neurotypical, able-bodied people with no caring
responsibilities who can spend long hours working on side hustles or other career development
and we tend to glorify that, but even if we were all that person, and we could all do
that, why?
We should just also be okay with people not working long extra hours.
We should encourage people to have non-tech hobbies, spend time with families, friends
or yourself, knitting, playing games, swing dancing - whatever.
Having lives outside of our careers.
So this is another reason why I love the idea of ten per cent time or any per cent time,
because I think it can help level the playing field a pit by offering everyone this extra
time to pursue the kind of learning and development that can really help further your career without
asking that people spend time outside of work to do so.
Even beyond this, there are more reasons that ten per cent time is a great idea.
It has to do with motivation, and how we are driven to do our most engaged, creative, and
inspired learning.
Drive, by Daniel Pink, which has been mentioned today, encouraged us to reconsider how we
think about motivation.
To move away from the idea of a stick-and-carrot reward-driven externally controlled motivation
towards an idea of intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation means we engage in a behaviour because it's satisfying to us, not
because of external pressure from risk or reward, it's the idea that left to our own
devices, without the stick and carrot to drive us, we won't settle through a stage of inertia
but seek out the things that are their own reward, like learning things that we are interested
in or building us a project that gets us into the joyful flow state.
Things like that.
So Pink names autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the ingredient of this genuine motivation
and talks about how to nurture it in supportive environments and perform and progress better
in the long run.
Of particular interest is the autonomy part of this not only because is it clear that
offering people ten per cent time is give them autonomy over self-directed learning
and growth but because Pink using Atlassian's 20 per cent time as a case study.
An exciting study on ceremony determination theory which talks about our innate psychological
needs that drive motivation, Pink explains that having autonomy over what we do has an
effect over all aspects of life, including work and career.
When we have autonomy to decide what and how we learn, this leads us towards mastery, the
desire to get better at something that really matters to us, where autonomy meets the desire
for mastery we can reach that wonderful stretch where we are learning things that are just
past our limits - not too beyond that we fell frustrated and defeated but not too little
that we don't feel the challenge.
Giving some people some per cent of time to engage in this intrinsically learning and
development can increase their satisfaction and creativity which in turn benefits their
actual work.
I wish I could talk longer about this, and I would encourage you to check out Drive and
more on intrinsic motivation, but now I want to talk about co-work ers and give food for
thought about how you might try ten per cent time at your company.
The first week I joined FT, I joined Junior Squad, put together by my colleague who was
a junior at the time.
And because she and Laura had noticed that juniors weren't using their ten per cent time.
Juniors don't feel able to time away from their day-to-day role or if they did, it was
difficult to know what skills to focus on.
When you're new to development.
There's so much to learn.
Where do you start in this was created to empower juniors to take advantage of that
time by giving as regular session to meet up and some guidance.
For my first week, I had a group of other juniors ready to work with and support each
other, and we built and delivered an internal tool from scratch, and we were able to fully
to decide on the architecture, the plan what features it had, when we delivered it, the
kind of ground-up decision-making that juniors don't get to make, really.
Now there are two junior squads working together on side projects to further their learning
and support each other.
But it's not just building side projects.
One co-worker, Mel, who you saw on the Junior Squad slide wanted to change from another
role in internal product to programming, and she used her ten per cent time to learn and
prepare for her application to Makers Academy which the FT Academy offers chance to switch
careers in development.
She's on the course now and will be rejoining us officially as a dev in July.
We have people who contribute to open source in their ten per cent time or take internal
tools built during ten per cent time and release them for general use.
Like my colleague Ash who released fastcharts.io.
We use ten per cent time for planning and practising talks, writing blog posts to share
knowledge, or helping organised meet-ups we take part in, and, as of this past month,
a group of us are planning a conference where we hope to support and feature a line-up of
first-time speakers only.
It's nice to see the different forms that people's drive for learning and development
take, and it's nice to know we are supported by our company and co-workers in doing this.
So, advice I can give for you if you want to consider ten per cent time: provide structure,
especially when you're starting out.
It might seem counterintuitive after all this talk of autonomy, but they're not mutually
exclusive.
Structure means providing a scaffolding for people to operate within when transitioning
to something like ten per cent time.
Suddenly being offered the freedom to do significant with this time can freeze you with too many
options, kind of like the problem we had before Junior Squad, so offering groups like our
Junior Squad can help people find their focus and find other kinds of learning that worked
for them if needed.
Communication is key.
If you're a manager, bring it up in your reports and have a genuine interest in what they're
doing in their ten per cent time.
You can have people share it at all hands or company update emails.
Then let people do what they're inspired to do.
What I hope your takeaway is that when you empower people to pursue their development
in a way that they find inspiring and fulfilling, everyone will benefit.
So give people trust and give people permission to do this, and give people room to learn
and grow by doing what they know they need and let them surprise you with where they
go when you give them that chance.
I hope I've given you a little bit to think about today.
Thank you for listening.