Most of our work at RogueSheep revolves around custom development of graphics and publishing applications for specialized workflows, automation and integration with other software components. We focus particularly on InDesign, InCopy and the other Adobe Creative Suite applications with an occasional foray into Quark XPress and general MacOS or Windows application development.
Though we love our positions within the flock, there are a few downsides for our developers. Almost all of the modern publishing and graphics applications have a long legacy in C and/or C++ and the Carbon APIs in particular on the Macintosh. The monolithic size of many of these applications coupled with the need for cross-platform development means it will be a long time yet before this situation changes substantially. Most of us have been working on this technology for many, many years. This of course is a great asset for our clients and creates a market for our skills.
Still, it is no secret that most engineers thrive on the chance to play with the newest and freshest technology our discipline has to offer. Unfortunately, our skills in these venerable technologies that pay the bills now may work against our success in the future. Besides just boredom, there are other dangers present in this cycle. As time marches on, our skill sets run the risk of stagnating, which in turn will marginalize our future market position.
Another, perhaps not so obvious, downside comes in the form of potentially stifling the creative expression of our developers. Many aspects of software development, be it user interface design or code architecture, are truly expressions of creative forces focused by the developer. Often, the nature of a consulting project means that the creative aspects of the components under development are already well-baked. The application of a creative solution can be too risky in a mature product. For instance, consider a typical porting project. Often there is just simply not the required allocation of testing resources to justify cleaning up or fixing an existing bad design. Similarly, potential improvements to the user interface can’t always be authorized when the client has not budgeted for training and revision to user guides and/or help documentation.
Realizing that happy engineers are more productive engineers, RogueSheep has decided to borrow a page from Google and has implemented a new employee benefit this past year: Pet Sheep Time. The concept of Pet Sheep Time is to allocate paid time for pursuing the personal development interests of each employee. Because much of our revenue is based on billable hours on projects with tight deadlines, we can’t justify a full 20% time plan the way Google does.
What we do instead is start with a base of 10 days of vacation per year. In addition, we allocate another 15 days of extended vacation that is exchangeable directly for Pet Sheep Time. These extended vacation days trade at a ratio of 1:2, so 5 days of extended vacation turn into 10 days of Pet Sheep Time. If you just need to shake off the monotony of the day job with some time at the beach and surf with the family, you can take a long vacation. On the other hand, if 2 weeks of fun and sun is enough for you, max out the Pet Sheep time for a decent personal project development cycle.
Of course, much like an extended period of vacation, Pet Sheep Time taken in bulk needs to be approved with the team and scheduled at an appropriate time for the current workload. RogueSheep also reserves the right of first refusal for any newborn Pet Sheep. Perhaps it will just become a free offering on our web site, or maybe it becomes an internal tool that makes all our jobs easier. In rare cases we might even find the work to be directly marketable. Either way, RogueSheep benefits from happier, more productive workers enjoying continual expansion of their personal skill set and education.
The reality of the past months has meant that we have been busy almost non-stop. We haven’t yet had a chance to pursue breeding new Pet Sheep, except for a few sporadic moments here and there. We look forward to combating that problem by hiring a few new developers in the coming months, at which point I hope we find more time to exercise our new pets. So, dear readers, what do you think about Pet Sheep Time? I will report back here on how the system works and detail any tweaks we make to the plan as we go along.