It is my turn to be the PMC Idle. My old project is finished and the whole term is not assign to new project. There are rumors that the company is going to have another restructure next month. Right now, the executives are waiting other projects to finish, so they can realign the engineers and shuffle people between departments. Since we have almost nothing to do, we start collecting verification statistics and benchmark from the previous project, which is something never done before. In the past, we were rushed from one project to another, never have the time to do a proper postmortem analysis. In the project, we have run over 20000 simulations, combined CPU time is over 6 years. Ironically, the simulations spent 20 years sitting in the server farm waiting for CPU become available. I am not the only one out of work, my boss has nothing to do as well. He called a meeting trying to figure out something for us to work on. At the end, we decided we should just relax and take this time to learn something new. I have assigned myself read management books borrowed from the library and proposed a few verification infrastructure projects. The problem is we will have to go through a few hoops to get those pet projects approved by the upper management. In this company, we don’t have any system setup for personal research or development work. We can only envy those in 3M or Google who can spend 20% of their time working on fun pet projects.