After shipping a release, once in two to three months, I get 10 to 15 days of free time. By free time, I mean no work, no one cares what you are doing etc., but you have to come to the office and go.
Do you get free time like that? How do you utilize this time?
I tend to read, but I feel cramming more and more information is not the best way to spend it.
It is a bit unusual. And strange, by the way. If your employer has no work for you, why does he force you to come to the office?
In general, there is always a work to do, even on a single project. If you have nothing to do, it means that your project is perfect. I don't believe in perfect projects, since I've never saw any. If your company has perfect projects, I wish I could take a look at how is it done.
If your project is not perfect, than you can spend this free time improving it.
Sometimes, you have just finished coding, you finally released the project, and the last thing you want to do is to continue to work with the code you've been on for the last three months. That's understandable. In this case, you can easily find another occupation to change your ideas and increase your knowledge. For example if you're a C# developer, learn Python, or learn how to use Reactive Extensions, or whatsoever.
You may also be tempted to do a small project for yourself during your free time. I don't advise to do that, not only because the code you write at your work generally belongs to your company, but also because you can be sued to use your enterprise hardware and other resources to do projects that has nothing to do with your actual work.
It may be a good idea to ask the question you asked on Programmers.SE to the concerned person, i.e. your boss. In fact, chances are that:
It is especially important to know what is the situation if your boss actually expects you to do something. For example, if I had employees, I would expect them to improve the project when they have finished writing code and resolving bugs. In the same way, when I work for a company at place, I always spent all the time working on the project and improving it if there were no bugs to resolve.
There is one exception: interns usually are not expected to do additional work on their own. But at least we expect them to come and tell us when they finished what we asked them to do, so that we assign them another task.
I actually end up having situations like that at my work. There tends to be a lull after releases for a couple of weeks while we gear up for the next release, and PM & Development managers argue about the prioritization of features for release n + 1.
I usually try to spend this time paying down technical debt that was incurred or adding features that I think are necessary, but that are never given proper resources due to the fact that they may not lead directly to revenue.
I have been in this situation more than once for more than one employer, believe me,
This is not common but certainly not unusual.
I won't go outright and say it is common though and it certainly isn't normal. This is a sign of poor management and/or project management. Here are some common themes I notice that produce lulls like this.
You could be in a large organization with a LOT of development resources. It becomes harder to effectively manage ongoing software projects and maintain 100% utilization of resources with a large resource pool.
Bad project managers. They do a terrible job of scheduling release work in such a way that resources are as close to 100% utilization as possible.
Maintenance/Feature project to existing software. Many times when there is a backlog of features or complex maintenance work, the work itself may not take much effort to implement, however requires a very high level of technical familiarity and business knowledge to do the work.
Subject Matter Expert. It is not uncommon for projects that have a wide range of technologies and/or business knowledge to have the need for small bands of teams to form around individual areas. These teams become Subject Matter Experts in their own regard and the company values them MORE for what they know and what are capable of doing than for what they are doing at the immediate moment where there is no work specifically for them.
Indeed strange,
Nonetheless you have some decent time which you could utilize maybe do some Team building exercise, get your colleagues together and learn and present some concepts on the language or framework you are using. And take some time to practice a bit of code on some random problems to improve your skills.
I tend to log on to StackOverflow and here during some short breaks available. Also picking up a new language could also be a perspective you can look into.
What I would recommend is that, during the two to three months when you are hard at work, you start to build of a list of things you want to do when the project is done and the couple of weeks of free time rolls around.
I reckon that if I added a URL and a note to a list every time I thought of something like that, after two to three months I'd certainly have a long enough list of things to do to keep me busy!
