I can see the point of not wanting your coders to totally bail out of a customer job when your firm needs to make a milestone, or when your client needs a deliverable so _they_ can pay their bills.

There should be some way to structure and budget at least _some_ employee time that does not go directly towards client deliverables. Consider that my compressor was used in many subsequent projects for clients; we were also able to bid on jobs that would otherwise have required too many assets.

So in reality, my three weeks of work ultimately resulted in billable hours to clients, but not at the time I performed the work.

One more thing - these days it is quite rare to perform on the job training. That's a huge mistake.

At the very least, purchase a corporate technical library, like the O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley books for each of the technologies you use. Also encourage the employees to actually read them.

Consider that I once worked for a hedge fund that had at least one hundred man-years of C++ source code. However their real-time online trading system was always falling on the floor, thereby costing them tens of millions of dollars per year. When I hired on, they emphasized the importance of reliability.

But when I visited to integrate my code - I worked remotely - their head coder pointed at something in my source then asked "What's that?"

"It's a C++ initialization list."

This led to me spending a couple hours teaching the guy who ran their entire development shop, some of the very most-basic concepts in C++. For him not to know what a C++ initialization list was, was like it would be for a Perl coder not to know what a regular expression is.

Lots of coders are able to get jobs, and even produce acceptable code without knowing a whole lot about their craft. That is to be expected, I wasn't born with my degree in Physics. Encourage your people to learn. They will be happier, and your firm will prosper.