Another Atlassian here... I'll vouch for everything here, but I'll add on one thing.
> It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by developers who were invested in solving their own productivity problems.
The flip side of this is that we have countless nonfunctional tools because the core maintainer has either left the company, switched to another project, or simply does not have the time to adequately adapt to new user/company requirements.
We do a great job encouraging innovation through 20% time, but we don't seem to be great at supporting these projects past the initial "hack it together" stage. The process can still be incredibly rewarding, but it is not without some shortcomings.
I wonder if any other companies implementing 20% time experience similar problems.
> It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by developers who were invested in solving their own productivity problems.
The flip side of this is that we have countless nonfunctional tools because the core maintainer has either left the company, switched to another project, or simply does not have the time to adequately adapt to new user/company requirements.
We do a great job encouraging innovation through 20% time, but we don't seem to be great at supporting these projects past the initial "hack it together" stage. The process can still be incredibly rewarding, but it is not without some shortcomings.
I wonder if any other companies implementing 20% time experience similar problems.