Well said, d4vis!

I don't think any reasonable company (put more cynically, any reasonably realistic company) is going to expect you to keep your nose to the grindstone for every minute of your workday. If no deadline looms, people are going to take it easy, and hacking on Perl projects is more useful to your employer than, say, reading Usenet or running a hockey pool.

Most of the programmers at my workplace keep a handful of interesting technical books around for those idle moments between crises, and management sanctions these occasional breaks as long as we deliver on time. I think this is one major reason why the standard of programming here is so high. (The other is code reviews.)

The concern that I have with the idea of idle hacking at work is that you tend to run into intellectual property issues (c.f. tilly's unfortunate situation). If you can avoid those and meet your deadlines, more power to you.

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:wq