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In the heyday of 20% time, Google had more money than they knew what to do with and the engineers were generally overqualified. Remember that in the early 2000s
by dub 6y ago
In the heyday of 20% time, Google had more money than they knew what to do with and the engineers were generally overqualified. Remember that in the early 2000s Google was famous for hiring people with PhDs and asking them build web servers.
Within that climate, 20% time was a great policy. Nobody needed "permission" to take a day out of the week to write a better source code management workflow or a config file VIM code completion for the internal codebase or improve build times or fix an annoying bug in another team's codebase, or even just generate good will for the company by contributing to open source projects. It was good for the company, and good for morale.
- yodon 6y agoThe way I've heard it expressed is "if you want to hire racehorses, sometimes you've just got to let them run"
- Privacy846 6y agoI don’t understand. A PhD is a degree in research. If you have a PhD and are building web servers you sound misqualified.
- topkai22 6y agoThat’s exactly the point- Google in that time frame did a TON of prestige hiring, whether or not it made sense for the actual work they needed to fill.
- Privacy846 6y agoThat’s not what I got from the original comment.
- cambalache 6y agoHow so? That was entirely the point
- Privacy846 6y agoYou’re not the origianl commenter so I don’t know how you divined that.
- dilyevsky 6y agoBecause it was never a thing
- dub 6y agoBuilding google _was_ research. It grew out of a PhD thesis. There are publicly available papers describing lots of the infrastructure innovations along the way (GFS, bigtable, mapreduce, borg, spanner, etc)
- Privacy846 6y agoTake it up with the grandparent comment!!! I replied to the part about hiring PhDs to build web servers, with the strong implications that they were overqualified (or—misqualified) for the task!!!