[ericdykstra]

I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive:

* You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets assigned to that person.

* Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or metrics based on an inflexible roadmap.

* Flexibility and autonomy is built into developers' schedules so they can work on things outside of just their rank-ordered task list.

[simianwords]

These sound like good ideas. I guess I just don’t work in such companies and I think this is the norm unfortunately.

There are strict timelines that span months if not years, often optimised to a large extent. There is little room for spontaneity and organic projects to come up.

[pavel_lishin]

I've worked at companies where this sort of thing is encouraged, and others where I'd be afraid to even ask about the possibility of doing such a thing. Naturally it's a spectrum.

(Although, there is also the company that claims to encourage it, and then buries you in bureaucracy...)