7 ms·

I've heard from some that 20% time has since become 120% time (at least in some non-engineering orgs). Thoughts?

• nostrademons 9y ago
  True but not a recent phenomena. If you hear stories from Google's early days when 20% time was a buzzword (around 03-05), people always worked well more than 8 hours. It takes a fairly massive amount of time to build something from scratch, and if you chose what you're working on, you'll want to spend that time. Managers are expected to adjust expectations and not require more than 4 days of work if a person has a 20% project, but given that it's software and software never seems to hew to planned deadlines, this tends to stretch. Actually, I suspect that a lot of the decline in 20% time is because Google hires more people now who want a stable 9-5, who have no particular ambition to try out a new idea on their own or build something from scratch.