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Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

• skittles 13y ago
  It's human nature to stop "screwing around" in order to get "real" work done and make your boss happy. The only way to keep 20% time is to force everyone to take it. If others on your team stop doing it, then the competitive balance isn't fair anymore. If your boss can get away with unofficially taking it from you, then she will. Something like 20% time must be in the company policies with punishment for those that discourage it.
  • cousin_it 13y ago
    Wow. I never thought of 20% time that way, but it makes perfect sense. Just like mandatory insurance. Thanks!
• tomasien 13y ago
  Isn't their continued investment in things like Google X sort of the more scalable replacement to 20% time, now that not all of the engineers are brilliant and driven? Just kind of a natural result of scale - find the people that were actually using 20% time and give them 100% time.
• hobs 13y ago
  I do not run a multi-billion dollar tech company, but I look at this and feel a bit saf. Some of the most useful stuff that has come out of google has been due to the labs, and the people who work at google are supposedly some of the people who are at the top of their game, who are now not going to benefit us with their great ideas, just work on the "more wood" approach, which just sounds like the google employees and google consumers are getting the wood.
• tokenizer 13y ago
  I curious if they did any cost benefit analysis in regards to declines in hiring quality when they removed such a feature.
  • brunov 13y ago
    I'm positively sure that they did. The sad thing is that they still thought that it was worth doing. To me, that says a lot about where Google's priorities are today.
  • toyg 13y ago
    They might have, and it might have told them it was the right thing to do. When I was in the Valley a few years ago, lots of people were quite convinced that top talent had already been completely chained to Google/Facebook/Twitter anyway, and there was no chance of poaching it away. If you follow that line of reasoning, there is no point investing in recruitment, at least locally.
    • api 13y ago
      Google is expanding quite a bit in Pittsburgh, New York, and a few other locations. I wonder if this is why? I also wonder though if the real estate hyperinflation of the valley is a factor. It negatively impacts the ability to attract out of town talent when a "starter home" is one million dollars and a decent apartment is over $3000/month. It also impacts retention. I meet a lot of folks from the Valley and SF who loved it but "left cause they wanted to start a family" or "left cause they got tired of spending >50% of their income on real estate." You have either pay exorbitantly high salaries or expand elsewhere.
      • humanrebar 13y ago
        Expanding in New York because of real estate prices in Silicon Valley? That sounds nutty, but maybe I'm missing something.
        • api 13y ago
          Take a look. Silicon Valley real estate prices are unhinged. I mean like frothing at the mouth, must be restrained or else he'll bite his tongue off crazy. Manhattan is similar to SV, but the thing is this: it is possible in New York to find reasonable (for the local market) real estate within a reasonable commute from work in one of the boroughs. It won't be the trendiest, but it's going to be okay. In SV you are talking about $800k or $2500+ a month for places that in other parts of the country would be called a "crack den." Either that, or you are going to be both far away and in an utterly dull, depressing suburb. SV is America's only six-figure ghetto. There is nowhere else where so much buys so little. Driving around on my most recent visit I was shocked by the squalor of these six-figure engineers and millionaires (relative to what you'd get for that price in sane markets). I'm not a local so I can't say for sure, but I'd be strongly tempted to blame the anti-development political mentality. With growing demand and no supply, this is gonna happen.
• diminish 13y ago
  Actually that's good news for startups. Maybe current Google employees now prefer to develop their ideas in their own startups rather than as part of the 20% program..
• smackfu 13y ago
  Honestly, this completely makes sense given how Google has been killing off non-profitable products lately. Why pay engineers to work on projects that will never meet a business case? This isn't the olden days of Google, where they would shovel anything out there and see if it stuck.
  • zmb_ 13y ago
    The same reason why a VC fund will invest in 10 startups knowing that 9 will have to be closed down as failures. 20% time meant that Google was continually making those bets in various areas, knowing that most will fail but that a few will succeed in a big way. They now seem to think that their management has obtained good enough crystal balls to be able to determine beforehand which of the potential products will succeed and which will fail. Meaning that they can scrap the 20% time and put all their "wood behind the few arrows" they have determined will succeed (you know, like Google+).
    • smackfu 13y ago
      It really depends on the real stats though. Because if only 1 out of 100 20% projects is worth anything, maybe it's just not a good use of your engineers. Like a VC fund with too low a success rate just goes out of business.
  • betterunix 13y ago
    "Why pay engineers to work on projects that will never meet a business case?" You need your engineers to put up with mundane, boring work. Paying them to spend a minority of their time on an interesting project helps.
    • cpncrunch 13y ago
      The 20% thing isn't really much of a perk anyway. I would only ever work for a company that let me work whenever I wanted, take naps whenever I wanted, go for walks whenever I wanted, and work on other projects. I do this at my current job, and I still end up being more productive in my actual work than any other developer I've ever met (and more productive than the average google engineer, I'd venture to say). I run the company, so I guess I can decide how I work :) See also the "people simply empty out" article posted on HN. Google seems to be falling for the PHB fallacy that people are just machines that crank out code. Perhaps that is what google is becoming, but I certainly wouldn't want to work there.
• btipling 13y ago
  It probably made more sense to have 20% time when Google didn't have tens of thousands of engineers. When you have a few hundred really smart people all working in the same building back in the early 2000's in Mountain View, it was I imagine a different thing than it would be now.
  • datasage 13y ago
    I think there may be some truth to this. With a company as large as Google, it may no longer be as beneficial to give everyone 20% time. Instead it's better to take the best engineers (and probably most innovative) and give them 100% time in Google X.
• mattstocum 13y ago
  And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?
  • anjc 13y ago
    They probably didn't lose as much money as they're gaining from the successful ones
    • johnward 13y ago
      I'm sure the gains from AdSense and Gmail alone outweigh anything they lost. Also engineers can stay happy if they work on things they like more often. So there could be an implied cost (by losing employees) to not allowing 20% time. I'll also add that it's almost impossible to stay focus on 1 thing 8 hours+ a day for 5 days a week. Even if there is no 20% time I'm sure they still lose time to unproductive activities. Maybe 20% time actually captured some of the time that would otherwise be spent browsing the web or making pointless comments like this on HN.
    • nfoz 13y ago
      It's not as if Google never would have thought to make a web-based mail if someone didn't do it in their 20% time...
      • toyg 13y ago
        At the time, Google was a search engine, period. Expecting Google to build a webmail system would have been like expecting Twitter to release an accounting package.
  • dasmoth 13y ago
    Does this matter if the engineers and/or the company learn something from the failed project? We under-value sincere-but-failed projects.
  • donw 13y ago
    Failure is a prerequisite for success, though. As long as those failures were inspected, digested, and understood, then the company gained more in terms of training than they lost in operational costs.
• akadien 13y ago
  This means that a lowly engineer with a great idea will leave Google to develop it instead of developing it at Google. Perhaps, this is a good outcome given the way Google keeps killing web services that people find useful but aren't profitable for Google.
  • jusben1369 13y ago
    I'd be more worried about hiring the next great engineer and continuing to grow. I imagine this was a huge draw for potential new recruits who might now look elsewhere. Existing employees usually have a lot of other reasons for inertia and therefore not leaving (comp and all the other perks)
  • marknutter 13y ago
    But then what's stopping Google from just turning around and buying their startup if it looks promising?
    • peacemaker 13y ago
      That was my first thought but then I realized that no-one can force them to sell to Google
      • LanceH 13y ago
        They can't force in the gun-to-the-head sense, but they can "force" a startup to sell with the threat of throwing a billion dollars at the problem themselves.
        • ryanmolden 13y ago
          Because one can buy success? Like Google+? Or a lot of things Microsoft has tried recently? I realize, all else being equal, a threat of a major investment by a deep pocketed company shouldn't be taken lightly, but the idea that Google can "throw a billion dollars" at a market segment and thus dominate seems like wishful thinking by management.
• ferdo 13y ago
  I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998: “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” “Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.” "Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.” “We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” “Search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.” > http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
  • anxious 13y ago
    Way to hijack the thread with anti-Google propaganda ...
    • levosmetalo 13y ago
      Why is this anti Google propaganda? I can't see a single point that is not reasonable enough on its own merit, and none of them applies to Google alone, but to all search engine providers.
      • officemonkey 13y ago
        I think he forgot the sarcasm tag, but it's hard to tell.
• throwawaykf02 13y ago
  A Google recruiter, while doing his spiel, told me in a light-hearted, offhand manner that some engineers call it "120% time". Having lurked here long enough and read similar sentiments from ex- and current google employees, it wasn't really news to me, but I was pleasantly surprised at his candor. But do any of the other companies listed do 20% time? AFAIK, they only have infrequent "hack days".
  • api 13y ago
    Yeah, Google still strikes me as probably a great place to work. 20% time is not common in the industry, and trust me-- if you work for Google you work in a much better place than your typical "enterprise software" hell-hole. But this might affect their ability to attract absolutely top-tier talent.
  • roguecoder 13y ago
    Ours instead does one week a year. They get scheduled like any other project. It means they can't be as ambitious or unbounded, but it also provides uninterrupted time to work on whatever-it-is you are interested in.
• ollysb 13y ago
  It's not like there's a shortage of startups to provide innovation so it probably just makes more sense to buy the successful ones than speculatively spend a fifth of their workforce on random ideas.
• JamesCRR 13y ago
  "if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other companies, which reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of others, wise to continue trying to copy it?" That's incorrect, AFAIK 3M were the first company to pioneer this approach (with 15% of time spent on self-directed projects). For example see: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-days-off-and-created-an-innovation-dynamo http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-day... Talking to a friend at 3M (who has been there 20+ years, an engineer with dozens of patents) I am told that while 15% officially still exists, for a long time it's effectively meant working 115% of hours. Nonetheless the tradition allowing self-directed research continues at 3M - and this might mean using lab resources, or creating prototypes without getting approval.
  • aylons 13y ago
    > Nonetheless the tradition allowing self-directed research continues at 3M - and this might mean using lab resources, or creating prototypes without getting approval. And get hours paid for it, even it being extra hours you wouldn't do other way.
    • rgbrenner 13y ago
      "And get hours paid for it," I don't work there, but I feel pretty safe in saying 3M researchers are not hourly employees.
      • atwebb 13y ago
        But it could correspond to other benefits such as applying the time towards paid time off or something like that.
  • Killah911 13y ago
    The author needs to google 3M an find out actual facts. It's like Google came up with it and Everybody was in a mad rush to copy it. God forbid, innovative ideas come from anywhere else but the companies we perceive to be the most innovative. Google was keen to adopt the practice that's worked well elsewhere and they seem to be focusing on other methodologies now, maybe they're figured out something that works well for Google NOW. It doesn't make 20% time more or less effective. It's just how companies evolve.
• jfasi 13y ago
  As someone inside Google, this simply doesn't square with reality: just yesterday I spoke to a friend about joining a project he's working on on a twenty percent basis.
• leoc 13y ago
  Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?
  • jusben1369 13y ago
    In all fairness 18 months ago the perception of Google is it was doing a LOT of things but none of them very well. Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) is just one example. So narrowing their focus (still) seems like a good idea. But having great engineers is the most important thing for any success so not sure why you'd take away a mystical founding pillar of your culture.
    • toyg 13y ago
      >Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) You mean Orkut. That was weird: it got wildly popular in Brazil, India, Turkey and other places, but never really took off in "the West" (weird name, bad quality when first released, boring UI...). I guess most of its members (it's still going!) will become G+ users, so it wasn't a complete failure in the end (in fact, a large userbase in developing countries is an insurance policy for the future, if you can keep it going).
      • tikhonj 13y ago
        He probably meant Google Buzz, which was an unmitigated failure. Orkut, all things considered, is actually reasonably successful.
        • toyg 13y ago
          Fair enough! I always thought of Buzz as a twitter clone more than a real attempt at a social network though (which Orkut undeniably was).
        • seunosewa 13y ago
          For what it's worth, I really loved Google Buzz, and all the techies I knew used it, but we didn't migrate to Google+ when Google Buzz was discontinued. We were just very sad.
• donw 13y ago
  Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. Then "professional" management came in and killed the proverbial goose. They had to focus more on the "bottom line". To do what was easy to measure and track, rather than what was necessary for the next step of the company, and now HP is a mere shadow of its former glory -- directionless and bleeding. 3M and Corning have largely avoided this fate, but it seems that Google won't. This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will continue to be market failures. Yet somehow, I'm incredibly sad, as it seems that too many companies go down this road.
  • api 13y ago
    It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think. I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss. But if you're not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys probably aren't. I've seen a related phenomenon in the startup world. Watched it, front row seat. I did a stint in startup-tech-focused business consulting. If you have a top-ten MBA and connections you can raise millions of dollars, set fire to it like the Joker in Batman Begins, and then raise millions of dollars again, serially. They were basically cargo cultists, mindlessly imitating the words, phrases, and superficial behaviors of supposedly-successful people and businesses. But there was no higher-order conceptual thinking beneath the surface-- no "there" there. They had no plan and no plan on how to acquire a plan. They got the money and then did a kind of mindless MBA rain dance until the money was gone. Then they'd raise more. I watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had money in hand ready to pay for when they were inches away from release. I mean a done product, ready to go, and better than anything else in its market. A product that they owned and had already paid to develop. The rationale was always some kind of MBA newspeak blather. I can't even remember it since my mind filters out sounds that imitate language but lack conceptual content. Otherwise I risk wasting a synapse. But what do I know? I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school, so what looks obviously stupid to me is maybe genius. I'm not saying I definitely could have done better, but I do think my probability of failure would have been <= to theirs. But there is no way in hell I could get what they got. Not a chance. I saw people try with better credentials than me and who were probably much smarter, but they lacked whatever special magic blessing the cargo cult guys had. I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I guess nobody ever got fired for losing their clients' money to a Harvard or MIT Sloan MBA. Nobody with a degree like that could be at fault. It has to be the employees (I've seen really good people get blamed for following stupid orders several times), bad market timing, etc.
• g20 13y ago
  20% time isn't dead -- I have been using it at Google consistently for over 7 years, and it has immensely benefited me. You don't need any permission, at least in engineering. However, I would agree that it is "as good as dead". What killed 20% time? Stack ranking. Google's perf management is basically an elaborate game where using 20% time is a losing move. In my time there, this has become markedly more the case. I have done many engineering/coding 20% projects and other non-engineering projects, with probably 20-40% producing "real" results (which over 7 years I think has been more than worth it for the company). But these projects are generally not rewarded. Part of the problem is that you actually need 40% time now at Google -- 20% to do stuff, then 20% to tell everyone what you did (sell it). I am a bit disappointed that relatively few of my peers will consciously make the tradeoff of accepting a slower promotion rate in return for learning new things. Promotion optimizes for depth and not breadth. Breadth -- connecting disparate ideas -- is almost invariably what's needed for groundbreaking innovation.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • notacoward 13y ago
      Reviews affect salaries even without promotions, and salary ranges are often tied to titles. If you're at the top of the range for your grade, even a good review might get you nothing. Anything that affects reviews - such as stack ranking - is therefore going to affect salaries, and I hardly think it's unreasonable to "give a shit" about salaries.
    • jrockway 13y ago
      You may want to graduate to management or UML architect or be bogged down in valueless meetings, but that's not for me. I just want to make computers do magical things. That's not what promotions are at Google. If you want to become a manager, that's called a ladder transfer, not a promotion. Promotions are basically for paying you more for making computers do more magical things. You are never asked to do anything other than software engineering, unless you want to do something other than software engineering. (Note that software engineering is more than opening up an editor and typing in code, though.)
• api 13y ago
  "Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others who have said it publicly. What happened to the company’s most famous and most imitated perk? For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects. This is a strategic shift for Google that has implications for how the company stays competitive, yet there has never been an official acknowledgement by Google management that the policy is moribund. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment from Quartz." What I've heard is more nuanced: the policy is not dead, but it's very hard to both satisfy the core demands of your job and maintain 20% time. So it's not dead, but possibly not an actual priority in the culture the way it used to be..?
  • cyphax 13y ago
    You're quoting such wordings as "effectively no longer exists" and "as good as dead", not "no longer exists" and "is dead". The article seems to be pretty nuanced already.
  • ctb_mg 13y ago
    The rest of the article describes how it's being pinched out of employees' schedules using performance evaluation policies.
  • CmonDev 13y ago
    > "What I've heard is more nuanced: the policy is not dead, but it's very hard to both satisfy the core demands of your job and maintain 20% time. So it's not dead, but possibly not an actual priority in the culture the way it used to be..?" ... and the difference in outcome is?
• stormcrowsx 13y ago
  Anywhere I've worked that says they do it ends up being more like 100% bottom line and the extra 20% is expected to happen as extra hours. I work on those "extra" projects during regular hours anyway. If I don't get to practice my creativity, programming turns into a drag and I get less done. Most of the time they happily deploy the extra stuff I make and I've never been reprimanded for it even when the extra work was a miss.
• acqq 13y ago
  The absolutely relevant Dilbert strip: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/
  • acqq 13y ago
    See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725
• snorkel 13y ago
  No companies should be offering 20% time anyway because it's a difficult promise to keep between crunch schedules and need to keep work between teams synchronized. Some companies also have creative interpretations of "20% time" as "We offer 20% time: you can spend 20% of your time doing whatever marketing needs you to do" turning the whole notion of 20% time into a disincentive. Hack Days work much better. Easier to accommodate and more fun.
  • bmj 13y ago
    Crunch schedules are often the result of poor management (at many points along the chain). My group seems to handle the balance reasonably well--we certainly go through crunch times (either because of deadlines, or customer requests), but when we are outside those times, we can spend some of our time playing with things. There's no guarantee that we get some percentage of our time each week or month to play with new things, but if we feel we can put it into our schedules, we have the freedom to do it.
  • showsover 13y ago
    Are those during working hours? That's the important part.
  • api 13y ago
    If you have to crunch a lot, your manager has poor time management skills.
  • DFGSDFG 13y ago
    ghdfghdfgh
• hvs 13y ago
  Six months after he took the reins, Page announced that Google would adopt a “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy that would put more of Google’s resources and employees behind a smaller number of projects. There's nothing more soul-crushing for an organization than a board of directors.
  • mattzito 13y ago
    I think it's not unreasonable for senior management at a company to say, "Geez, you know, we have our fingers in too many pies". Sometimes their logic is sound - they're distractions, they're consuming resources that could be used on core business ideas, we can shift innovation to a focused group of our core innovators. And sometimes it's not sound - it's purely about the dollars and sense. But to argue that the board of directors is what's soul crushing about an organization seems odd to me.
    • jzwinck 13y ago
      "we can shift innovation to a focused group of our core innovators" It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what happens when someone on another team has a great idea? Do we transfer that person to the Innovation Department to continue innovating? What would that mean for their team left behind, relieved explicitly of responsibility, and implicitly of capability, to innovate? Maybe the whole company should be tasked with innovation, but innovators should be allowed 80% time to write CRUD apps if they so choose.
      • mindcrime 13y ago
        It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what happens when someone on another team has a great idea? Exactly. At the end of the day, anybody in a company can be responsible for a valuable innovation. This is why something like "20% time" is such a good idea in the first place. It avoids the trap of assuming that you can actually accurately select the people who "should" be doing innovative stuff. OTOH, having a dedicated Research department where people spend 100% of their time on research and cutting-edge stuff also seems like a good idea. An interesting approach might be to have both "20% time" AND "Google X" but with a policy that allows the Hoi Polloi folks a chance to rotate through the dedicated research group on occasion.
• cygwin98 13y ago
  Does it mean that we reach peak Google now?
• EnderMB 13y ago
  I know it'd be impossible to know these stats, but it'd be interesting to see how many (recent) ex-Googlers went on to start their own successful startup. With that, it'd also be quite interesting to speculate how many of these business ideas could have benefited by being "within" Google. In many ways it's a shame, although I think most of us can appreciate that the Google of yesterday is a different beast to the Google of today. One area where I think it could really hurt Google is in recruitment. I imagine the "20% rule" would have been a huge factor in getting the best engineers to work at Google. With this news, I can see some of the magic of Google disappearing in my mind.
• thehme 13y ago
  First, I was sort of annoyed that I had to "sign in" in order to read public statements from former employees about the "20% time" being dead at Google. Beyond that, I think few companies exists that just want to make great products and know that eventually the money will come. In the meantime, most companies are there to make money and if the numbers show that people are more productive working 100% of their time on responsibilities rather than innovation, then who can blame them - they want to make money. However, this is Google, a mega company making tons! of money, so I expect them to encourage innovation. In fact, someone I know recently interviewed there and the "20% time" for side projects is something they seem proud to promote, so can it really be dead? I think the issue may be in the managers/company EXPECTING results out of this time investment, rather than seeing it as a way to encouraging innovation that won't necessary lead to a Gmail or Talk.
• jrockway 13y ago
  I'd better stop working on my 20% project. I just wish I didn't have to hear this from Quartz!
• nappy-doo 13y ago
  Funny, I'm a Googler. I just went to the internal 20%-time page. It's still there. Still looks about the same as last year, and the year before that. Despite the rumors, I don't think 20%-time is dead.
• winter_blue 13y ago
  > Six months after he took the reins, Page announced that Google would adopt a “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy that would put more of Google’s resources and employees behind a smaller number of projects. This meant killing off Google Labs, which had previously been Google’s showcase for its experimental projects—many of them products of employees’ 20% time. Guess who advised Larry Page to focus on a small number of projects? Steve Jobs.[1] It seems like Larry's acceptance of Jobs' advice has sabotaged Google. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but one does wonder if this was Jobs' secret intention. [1] See the second quote in: http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-larry-page/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-l...
  • grsites 13y ago
    On the other hand, focusing on a small number of great products is what Apple always did under Jobs. The first thing Jobs did when he came back to Apple was jettison superfluous products and concentrate on what Apple was good at. Seems to me like he was giving genuine advice.
    • nostrademons 13y ago
      He was giving genuine advice for himself. Apple did awesome with focus and top-down management because the guy at the top was Steve Jobs, who has an uncanny knack for sensing what the market needs. But companies are different: what was a core competency of Apple is something that Google doesn't have, and Google has various other core competencies that Apple never had. The general rule of business is "play to your strengths", not "emulate the winner".
  • snowwrestler 13y ago
    I think it lines up with how Jobs ran Apple. He killed a ton of "blue sky" research projects after he took over as CEO, and Apple under his leadership spent a lot less on research than Microsoft or Google.
• elliottcarlson 13y ago
  My previous employer had a 10% time in place - which while in theory was a great idea, I found myself always too busy to take advantage of the time. This is in no fault to my employer, or my direct management - but lets face it - at a startup, there is little room to not be working. When you already are coding long hours, trying to make quick changes, implementing new features constantly - there just isn't enough time to do it.
  • potatolicious 13y ago
    I disagree. I currently work at a startup with 10% time, and barring rare "the servers are on fire!" events, we're pretty religious about doing it. Even when we skip it, it's credited so we can take it later (arguably better since you get longer stretches of it). Like most startups, we also operate at breakneck pace, we're not exactly sitting around twiddling our thumbs. This strikes me as the same as "I don't have time to..." excuses people make in their personal lives. If you value it enough, you will find a place for it. It's all about how much you actually value the 10%-time, or if it's just a recruiting/PR gimmick. If the company approaches it from a "it would be nice if..." angle, it will always find a million things that are higher-priority than 10%-time. If you approach it from the "this is a critical part of company strategy" angle, you will find ways to keep it sacrosanct.
    • elliottcarlson 13y ago
      I was often encouraged to just take the 10% time - and perhaps it is an excuse on my part, but at the same time I valued my work and took pride in accomplishing certain tasks that I felt that that work was far more important. In the end, I did spend some time on personal projects that ended up getting implemented, but in the year and a half I was there, it was definitely not an often used perk (on my part).
• kyllo 13y ago
  Businesses don't live and grow forever. They have a lifecycle, and when they get big enough and their business model becomes mature enough, they divert resources away from risky innovation and toward defending the fortune they've amassed, defending their primary cash cow products against competition through anticompetitive practices like patent litigation, and promising steady returns to shareholders. The problem is, this swing toward conservatism tends to fossilize both the product and the organization. If you fully de-risk your company, it will stagnate. No risk, no reward either. And in Google's quest to kill Microsoft, they are becoming Microsoft.
• krob 13y ago
  This always happens when large companies assert more control in the form of analytic analysis on the productivity of virtually everything. When you are building a pipeline which must be efficient, analytic analysis / statistical analysis plays a huge role in improving efficiency, but it's also a stifling factor when it pertains to the creativity of new solutions. Google previously focused more on the creativity of new better solutions to an array of different verticals. Now they are focusing on the creativity of their own "super-man-team" instead of the "our peoples make crazy stuff, we hire amazing people" and let them go at it in their spare time and build innovative projects. Maybe this time marks a period in Google's future where they stop innovating in a disruptive fashion.
• argumentum 13y ago
  Seems like Google is splitting into Google-Page and Google-Brin (X Labs). I'd much rather join the latter, but perhaps it wouldn't exist without the former.
• notacoward 13y ago
  This doesn't seem all that surprising. You get what you measure. If Google has been placing a greater weight on direct short-term contributions than on blue-sky projects, and then putting employees in competition with one another, then of course employees are going to feel under pressure to reallocate that 20% of the time toward the stuff that makes them money. Some persist anyway, because of personal satisfaction or (much less often) sincere belief that what they're working on in their 20% time will eventually win big for both themselves and Google, but employees take those risks and make those deals at every company. The middle managers have no reason to support it as the general case, and most employees don't have the backbone to force the issue. Ultimately it's a bit like working from home. Some do it even at companies that don't have a policy for it, and some companies that do have such a policy don't really make it possible.
• na85 13y ago
  Pretty sure this is false. My brother is a google engineer and he was demoing a project for me that he and some other guy had been doing in their 20% time over the last week. This was yesterday.
• hiby007 13y ago
  Yes because for innovation they have a separate unit namely GOOGLE VENTURES.
  • perishabledave 13y ago
    Sure, but 20% helps with innovation within Google, give googlers room for to flex their creative muscles, and is attractive to potential hires.
• at-fates-hands 13y ago
  I know a few people who have worked there over the years and they confirmed the same thing - albeit with a huge caveat. The two people I know said the 20% was a way for their brains to take a break and think creatively. Nothing was too crazy or far fetched not to try out. They said it helped combat the crazy hours and working from dusk till dawn. In short, it helped prevent burnout. I would be willing to bet the turnover rate will start increase as their employees start to work more hours, without any breaks, and nothing to give them something to look forward to and burnout starts to settle in much faster. Sure, it's not going to make them go bankrupt, but it will have a real world cost to their bottom line.
• cpcarey 13y ago
  20% time helps bring in the "entrepreneurial" types of engineers that Google seeks to hire and as it starts to disappear, they might see fewer of those hires and more of those engineers leaving. Perhaps it's simply because Google has grown to the size where it can take on really big innovative projects (Google X) instead of the respectively smaller projects that were created under 20% time. They've found that they can't have both without hurting their bottom line, so they've decided to go after the big projects. It's a significant shift, but in the end, it could be good for all of us because many have the resources to go after the small and medium wins, but only a few can go after the really big wins.
• dekhn 13y ago
  I am a Googler. I will only speak to my personal experience, and the experience of people around me: 20% time still exists, and is encouraged as a mechanism to explore exciting new ideas without the complexity and cost of a real product. My last three years were spent turning my 20% project into a product, and my job now is spent turning another 20% project into a product. There was never any management pressure from any of my managers to not work on 20% projects; my performance reviews were consistent with a productive Googler. Calling 20% time 120% time is fair. Realistically it's hard to do your day job productively and also build a new project from scratch. You have to be willing to put in hours outside of your normal job to be successful. What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google's compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be. Certainly I, and many other Googlers, are simply super-motivated and willing to use our free time to work on projects that use our infrstructure because we're intrinsically interested in using these things to make new products.
  • VikingCoder 13y ago
    At my last job, I had to wait two weeks to get a VM created and assigned to me. At my current job, I can't get a port opened to make an OUTBOUND connection to Amazon Web Services. Yeah, working at Google, it's definitely easier to use big tools to try new things, huh?
    • dekhn 13y ago
      We have a lot of perks, including great food, but ultimately it comes down to: 1) awesome coworkers I learn from daily 2) access to infrastructure and few barriers 3) a competent IT team for corporate IT The combination of the three is rare in industry.
      • calinet6 13y ago
        What I'm hearing is that the dream of Google has been reduced to some characteristic bullet points and a reasonably positive conclusion. This isn't a criticism or negativity, all things considered it seems to be a great company to work for; it just seems to be a bit more homogenized than it used to be.
• spankalee 13y ago
  As a Googler, I can confirm that this article is... completely wrong. I don't have to get approval to take 20% time, and I work with a number of people on their 20% projects. I can also confirm that many people don't take their 20% time. Whether it's culture change due to new hiring, lack of imagination, pressure to excel on their primary project, I'm not sure, but it is disappointing. Still, in engineering No permission is needed.
  • kzahel 13y ago
    I am not a googler but what you say is more in line with my thinking. You don't ask for, but simply take the 20% time. Ask forgiveness, not permission. Until they send out a memo saying you're only allowed to work or think about tasks assigned by a superior officer, then assume you're an autonomous being :-)
    • k3n 13y ago
      Not a Googler either, but I can't believe it'd be anything like the forgiveness/permission dichotomy, since I believe they're all given explicit permission upfront. It's a part of the culture. Rather, I've always imagined that it's not that it'd be closer to the perks like "unlimited vacation time": you can't just decide "well I'm taking the next 5 years off", because that'd be a dereliction of duty. In other words, if you have the premier release of your main project coming up in 2 weeks, it may be in your best interest to not take that 20% time for the time-being, but instead use that time to fully ensure that your project has a successful launch. But, if you don't have any big deadlines coming up soon, and you're reasonably on schedule, then by all means take the 20% time. The 20% time is a perk, and just like many other perks, your use of the perk cannot preclude any tacit duties that you may have, which include delivering on your assigned projects. But, this is just an outsider's view, I could be completely wrong.
    • spankalee 13y ago
      The policy is that you don't ask, you tell. If your manager needs you to focus on your primary project, she can ask you to bank your 20% time for up to a quarter, but then you get to use that saved time.
• rel 13y ago
  Just because people aren't "approving" the project doesn't mean it's not going to happen. Chrome started as a 20% project and it wasn't approved until it was way into development.
• pm 13y ago
  3M didn't copy 20% from Google. They were doing it well before Google ever decided to do it.
• calinet6 13y ago
  /play trombone Whelp, it's been grand, Google. Who's next? Someday a company might actually grow correctly and preserve their humanity and agility despite our tendency for social discord as a species, but it's a damn hard problem.
• test-it 13y ago
  It's very logical. Back in the day G had very few, very bright employes. Nowadays they have a lot more people, who are, on average, less intelligent and have less will power. Which means the majority of G-ers today are incapable of innovation and letting everyone take the Fridays off is a huge waste.
• petercooper 13y ago
  There was a joke going around recently. "I work at Google and still have 20% time. It's called Saturday." (Yes, yes, the % isn't correct. It doesn't matter ;-))
  • nostrademons 13y ago
    10 hours on Saturday. ;-)
• pg 13y ago
  The title of this article may unintentionally embody a point about 20% time, because GMail and AdSense have something else in common that Occam's razor implies was more important than Google policies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit
  • kirinan 13y ago
    Are you saying giving gifted and talented people resources and means to build things that they build amazing things? This is ludicrous! To your point though, Google probably has many "Paul Buchheits" (by that I mean at his level of intellect and ability), and so do many other companies. Being on the end of having a good idea, and not having the companies backing to build it, it sucks and discouraging. Thats why people make startups though (or at least why I like to believe some people do), to take that idea that the company didn't give them the time/resources for and build it themselves. One part to show the company that they were dumb, but also because they believe in the idea. I think as corporations try to maximize profits and throw things like 20% time out the door, the world will see even more startups and I do believe we are currently seeing that type of trend with the newer generation. Ideas can consume people, and if corporations learned to harness that power (Like 20% time and hackathons) they could innovate in ways that people believed impossible.
• zhyder 13y ago
  I'm a Googler, and comments here from other Googlers are correct: 20% time still exists and requires no manager approval, but only a minority of engineers take advantage of it. For instance, in my team of 14, only 2 work on 20% projects. I haven't been at Google long enough, but I doubt there was ever a time when a majority of engineers did 20% work. It's hard: you have to take away not only time, but also focus from your main project (which like all software is probably already taking longer to build than you'd like). Most engineers aren't motivated enough.
• levosmetalo 13y ago
  Did that 20% time actually bring anything useful at Google, or it's just a myth? IIRC, both Gmail and AdSense mentioned in the title didn't come to Google as 20% byproducts, but as acquisitions. Does anyone know of any popular (by Google standards) product that started that way?
  • guyzero 13y ago
    Transit directions on Maps started as a 20% project.
    • levosmetalo 13y ago
      It's just one single feature of one of the projects. If that's the poster child of 20% projects then that's good enough reason to ditch them.
      • guyzero 13y ago
        Transit compiles schedule data from hundreds of worldwide transit agencies, does custom pathfinding and is a pretty sophisticated project all on its own. It's not gmail, sure, but there are entire companies that do the same thing as this "one single feature." Also, as others have pointed out repeatedly, 20% has not been "ditched." And this isn't a poster child, it's just one example.
      • Matt_Cutts 13y ago
        Transit directions have been a big reason why some people prefer Google Maps to (say) Apple's maps. In places like New York or Tokyo, it's a huge win for users. It's also spawned an open specification (Google Transit Feed Specification) that has sparked a ton of innovation in the public transit space, including real-time location updates from public transit authorities. Full disclosure: one of the big leaders of the Google Transit project was Avichal Garg, who was a PM for the webspam team when he ramped up Google Transit in his 20% time.
• Fuxy 13y ago
  And this is why business will never truly innovate and government backed projects that waste tonnes of money will bring the truly revolutionary discoveries. It is probably not intentional but their inability to manage funding is actually a blessing in disguise for most labs. Business is just not capable of long term dedication to experimentation planing an innovation.
• freyr 13y ago
  After getting a PhD in (non-CS) engineering and a boring office job, I became somewhat enamored with the idea of Google's 20% time allowance and its apparent spirit of innovation. It led me recently to begin investing my free time in learning the foundations of CS properly. While this effort could lead me down different paths, in the back of my mind, I always thought it would be really cool to land a job at Google. That possibility, whatever its likelihood, has motivated me. So in some sense, this comes as depressing news. But not really, because another company will take its place, and I can set my sights there.
• null_ptr 13y ago
  Maybe developers smartened up. If you have a solid idea that Google would benefit from and allow you to work on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do something similar on your own? Google is no longer a cutesy company, they're a corporation like all others, and most employees probably woke up and realized they don't owe it a single thing, let alone their brightest ideas.
  • mindcrime 13y ago
    If you have a solid idea that Google would benefit from and allow you to work on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do something similar on your own? To be fair, not everybody is interested in running a company, and doing all the "other stuff" that it entails beyond writing code. Also, Google provide great resources and infrastructure, which it would be hard to replicate (assuming the hypothetical project in question required Google scale infrastructure).
    • null_ptr 13y ago
      I think that when it comes to an idea one truly believes in, even if one is not inclined towards running a company, one is likely to give it a shot anyway. I'm talking about real passion here. The kind of passion that would cause you to break down if Google were to decide that your 20% time is misused and make you do other things instead, or if your side project took off and was taken away from you.
      • mindcrime 13y ago
        I think that when it comes to an idea one truly believes in, even if one is not inclined towards running a company, one is likely to give it a shot anyway. I can see where that would be true for some people, but I doubt it's universally true. And it may even be that it just makes more sense to do the idea inside Google than doing it independently anyway. Again, look at the resources and infrastructure Google already have assembled. And some people may have just bought into the Google mission / vision / whatever, and / or just feel a sense of loyalty to GOOG. Anyway, I don't mean to suggest that it never makes sense to quit and do your own thing. I mean, hell, I probably would, as far as that goes. I'm just saying that there are some legitimate reasons why some people might prefer to just work within Google than quit and run off to start a new business of their own.
• cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  "Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and the level of productivity that teams are expected to deliver assumes that employees are working on their primary responsibilities 100% of the time." I know that it is a large company and control is required to manage everything, but this sounds depressing. I'm glad I work in a tiny company and even smaller team.
  • plywoodtrees 13y ago
    This description may lead you to imagine software counting how many lines someone changes or how many hours of the day someone is typing. That would be pretty depressing, but I don't think Google does that. Their performance measurements are much more based off asking other engineers and colleagues what they think of your work.
• sebnukem2 13y ago
  And that signals the beginning of the end for Google, when an engineer-lead company is taken over by "managers". It happened and will happen to all companies.
• DFGSDFG 13y ago
  VIOLATIONS MURDER IN WOMANS - SEXUAL ZONES ESTIMULATIONS WITH NANO COMPUTERS IN YOUR CHILDS. TRILLONS OF IPs IN NANO COMPUTERS IN YOUR CELULAR NUCLEOUS BELIVE IT!!!. WE HAVE THE VIDEOS. RAW MATERIAL FOR MAKING FOOD - INDUSTRIAL TALC - MONSATO 60% OF THE CORPORATIOSN IN THE WORLD SELL THIS TALC TO OTHER TO MAKE FOOD. WHO IS THE BOYFRIEND OF YOU DAUGTHER. VIOLATIONS MURDER IN WOMANS - SEXUAL ZONES ESTIMULATIONS WITH NANO COMPUTERS IN YOUR CHILDS. TRILLONS OF IPs IN NANO COMPUTERS IN YOUR CELULAR NUCLEOUS BELIVE IT!!!. WE HAVE THE VIDEOS. RAW MATERIAL FOR MAKING FOOD - INDUSTRIAL TALC - MONSATO 60% OF THE CORPORATIOSN IN THE WORLD SELL THIS TALC TO OTHER TO MAKE FOOD. WHO IS THE BOYFRIEND OF YOU DAUGTHER. HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA – DANILO ANDERSON VIDEOS TO HUMAN RETINS SOLD TO TRIBUNALS. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS – CICLICAL CICLYC TINKING FORCING YOU TO BELIVE IN FIXED FAKE IDEAS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN http://www.mudpgi.blog.comHUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com HUMAN RACE STUDIES IN VENEZUELA. SATELITAL SURVILLANCE IN VENEZUELA – NEURAL PATRONS – YOUR EXTRA THINKING SOLD TRIBUNALS. PEOPLE SOLD TO HUMAN RACE STUDIES. AUTORIZATED BY THE HAGE AUTORIZATED BY SECRETARY BAN KI MOON. http://www.mudpgi.blog.com http://www.mudpgi.blog.com
• DFGSDFG 13y ago
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• DFGSDFG 13y ago
  dfgjdfgh
• spiritplumber 13y ago
  That's sad. I remember being in direct competition on a project with a google 20% team, and only beating them by a few weeks. We had fun with that. I guess that's just the natural life cycle of companies?
• zerooneinfinity 13y ago
  I can confirm this. When I went on interview at Google and asked various engineers what they did for their 20% time they all said they didn't have time for it.
• mck- 13y ago
  > And what’s more, if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other companies, which reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of others, wise to continue trying to copy it? I thought it was Google that copied it from 3M, who invented the Scotch Tape during the 20% time?
• graeme 13y ago
  This is the opposite of Black Swan farming. With any project like 20% time, you should expect that almost everything produced will be worthless. So what? All you need are 1-2 big hits to justify the entire program. Letting employees work on what they think will be valuable is a bottom up approach that can reveal knowledge that's inaccessible to managers. Some comments on here say that the program 'only' created Gmail. That's been a massive success for Google. That + the smaller successes it has led to likely justify all the projects that didn't pan out.
  • chii 13y ago
    but the problem is that the incentivization scheme for a middle manager doesn't align with what 20% time gives to the org. Lets suppose you are a middle manager, and your performance is based on the completion of projects assigned to you by upper management, and perhaps a little bit of weight is given to the innovation your team cranks out in 20% time. If the projects you are given is either slipping, or is not achieving the type of success that makes you look good (for the purposes of your own promotion/bonus), do you allow your "resources" to work on 20% time, which may bring very little benefit to you directly even if it is successful (it brings benefit to the engineer, not you), or do you divert that 20% time resource to projects that _do_ give you personal benefit?
• deleted 13y ago
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• zafka 13y ago
  While I am saddened by the fact that this is coming to an end, I understand it. I have always wanted to work in a "Bell labs" type of environment. Now that the little fish I was working at got bought by "big Corp" I have been angling to get something like this started at our division. But.... while I have the type of mind that does very well pulling in disparate ideas and melding them together, I have found that a lot of the other engineers, even the very smart ones, are not always good at invention. I can imagine that Google, has possibly found a way to identify the best group to allow the extra free time, rather than allowing it to everyone. Ideally, if they gave 75 to 100% freedom to the 1 to 5% that have the "gene" of true creativity, they will be better off.
• smutticus 13y ago
  Public companies must focus 100% of their energy and attention on this quarter's earnings. Anything less and the CEO could get fired. Actual investment in long term strategies gets reduced to lip service.
• SkyMarshal 13y ago
  I've always wondered if one day a week was the optimum use of 20% time, given the need for extended concentration and flow to do really good work in software development. Google has had some success with it obviously, but I wonder how it would have worked had they done it by Quarter or semi-annually instead. Say, you meet a certain threshold in your performance review, you get a lump sum of ~20% of the time period that the review covers. Say for a quarterly review, if you meet the threshold, you get 2.6 weeks. Or semi-annually you get 5.2 weeks, straight. You have to be at the office, but you can work on your own project during that time. 5.2 weeks is some serious hacking time, enabling a great deal of extended focus. Highly productive Google engineers could probably bootstrap a startup MVP in that time, except of course Google would own it.
  • nostrademons 13y ago
    You don't have to do it as one day a week. Personally, the way I've always taken it was "I've got no pressing tasks I need to take care of for my main project or for coworkers? Great, I'll work on my 20% project!" And I've found out that over my nearly 5-year career at Google, this averages out to pretty close to 20%. But there were weeks that I did nothing but 20% work, and there were stretches of 2-3 months where I didn't do 20% work at all. We're evaluated over a long period of time and nobody really knows what you do day-to-day, so it doesn't actually matter all that much how you take 20% time, the important thing is what comes out of it.
• morgante 13y ago
  So we can effectively say goodbye to a strong engineering culture at Google. With layers and layers of PMs, the best and brightest have no desire to entire their system. So Google's left with the academically talented individuals who don't have much initiative or drive outside of extremely narrow scopes. (So, innovation was killed by the bottom line.)
• _pmf_ 13y ago
  > It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons What a huge sacrifice HP made thereby. Friday afternoon is otherwise the most productive time of the week.
• So8res 13y ago
  Bullshit. I'm a Googler, and I'm 20%ing today (as soon as I finish breakfast). There's lots of pressure to focus and do well on your main project, sure. But it's not external pressure, it's internal pressure. Everyone wants their software to be great. It's hard to detach for a day, ignore the influx of bugs and emails, switch gears, and work on something completely different. Most engineers don't want to spend the mental overhead. But speaking from experience, when you do choose that path you get nothing but support.
• nostrademons 13y ago
  I just launched a project, which made it to #2 on Hacker News, which was done almost exclusively in 20% time. (Well, also a few nights and weekends, and my manager gave me some time away from my main project to work on it, but it was in all ways a 20% project. Self-conceived, self-directed, and done in addition to my regular job duties.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209713
• eliben 13y ago
  A completely wrong piece of HN-bait.
• api 13y ago
  Just wanted to say one more thing: I've heard some Googlers say this is accurate, and I've heard some say 20% time is alive and well. Google is gigantic these days. It probably depends a lot on where you are in the company. Two people in different Google divisions or even physical offices are not going to have the same experience.
  • mathgladiator 13y ago
    > It probably depends a lot on where you are in the company This means it's dead as a company wide policy, and it's problematic to be sold during recruitment.
• vijayboyapati 13y ago
  I worked at Google from 2002-2007, and the dirty little secret is that there is no 20% time. It's 120% time. You work a full schedule, and if you want to put in extra hours for a side project go ahead. I explicitly asked to use 20%-time to work on a side project (i.e., literally take 1 day a week to work on it) and was refused. 20% time has always been a great marketing gimmick for Google. I remember interviewing candidates and mentioning it as a bonus to prospective candidates - most employees mentioned it as a bonus because we were inculcated into believing it was actually a bonus. It's much easier to see that it was never a real perk once you're outside the bubble.
  • billnguyen 13y ago
    As a former Googler definitely agree with the 120% time. But I think its more because its hard to do any work effectively only once a week. So in order to make your 20% time be useful you just have to put in more time than 20%. And obviously you can't reduce your other workload so you put in extra time to make your 20% project successful. And for what its worth, I personally have never had a problem requesting for 20% time. Like all big companies, it really depends on your team and boss. I believe your experience of straight out rejection is more the exception than the rule.
• graycat 13y ago
  There are a lot of good remarks in this thread. I will try to add a point I haven't seen here yet: Once I was in a big company with a big, famous research lab. The group I was in, just three of us, was led by a guy who had taken some technical work and published some papers. The journals were peer-reviewed but semi-popular so reached some ordinary business customers. The papers fit in with a lot of hype at the time. So, some of the customers picked up a phone and called our group for more information. So, presto, we got contact with real customers otherwise essentially forbidden in research. Why forbidden? Because the sales/marketing guys wanted to be the guys who had total control over all contact with customers. Eventually our little group broke up, and I wanted to do some research that would lead to products to be sold to customers. I started to discover that no one in the company wanted that. The big guys in research wanted to throttle all contacts outside research and mostly didn't want any. The people in sales, marketing, product development, and product production didn't want to deal with anything new from research. No one wanted a research worker bee talking to real customers. Next, when research did come up with something that might be of interest to real customers, no one wanted to pursue that opportunity. Again, the marketing people wanted to be the source of all new product/service initiatives. No one in research wanted a research worker bee to get credit/blame having a product go from research to success/failure in the market. In the end, research was forced to be essentially irrelevant to the business. Finally research was turned into a patent shop so that lawyers could take the big patent portfolio, go to companies, claim patent infringement, and 'license' the patent portfolio. Point: Generally, a business organization, given a nice new product/service to offer their customers, has multiple layers of organizations and people, processes, reasons, etc. why they just do not, not want to come out with anything new. Period. Curiously, yes, some of the people at some of the customer organizations were eager to work with our group in research as a way to look more innovative within their own organizations. Here, of course, they didn't have to work through layers of managers but only had to exercise their own freedom to handle their own responsibilities. So, lesson: Commonly individuals are ready to do and offer new things to others or try new things from others, but it's the layers of managers who block such things. So, the blockage of these layers of managers is one of the main reasons and opportunities for entrepreneurship. Yes, it's dumber than paint, but it's usually the way of the world.
  • 13y ago
• jlees 13y ago
  Seems odd that nobody is mentioning Google's in-house makerspace, hackathons, and 20% weeks (where engineers without 20% projects, or who prefer time-boxed commitments, take a week once a quarter to work on stuff). I ran a 20% week project last year - or maybe the year before? - and there are several really fantastic people working tirelessly on the Garage and other makerspace stuff to ensure that the 20% mindset is alive and kicking. I totally understand the "management killing freedom of experimentation" comments, but they are only one side of the story, and a side explicitly pulled from disgruntled Xooglers at that. The Garage is one of the things I miss most about Google - both the makerspace itself, and what it represents. We hosted several internal hackathons there, both within and outside the intern season and had great success.
  • jarek 13y ago
    > 20% weeks (where engineers without 20% projects, or who prefer time-boxed commitments, take a week once a quarter to work on stuff) Wouldn't that be 8% weeks?
• joshfraser 13y ago
  Larry Page had that chat w/ Steve Jobs where Page asked Jobs for advice. Jobs supposedly told him he had to start cleaning shop if he was to avoid becoming the next Microsoft. Page apparently took Jobs' message to heart as he immediately began unifying services and shutting down anything that didn't fit with the new mission. It's easy to see how 20% time was part of the reason things got so messy and it makes sense why they're scaling it back now.
• xadxad 13y ago
  Mimms, original author, posted a follow-up which incorporates a lot of the comments from here. I've posted it to HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725
• cpeterso 13y ago
  When did Google first introduce 20% Time? I'm curious how it became an official activity.
• GoldfishCRM 13y ago
  This is great news. Even Google that where a startup started are starting with big business bad manners. All of us know that starting a company is much much easier then it was before and defently not like in the 1950 where you needed a lot of money to get going. All of my worries that google will keep a dominated position on the market is gone. So lets go out there and kill it.
• nerfhammer 13y ago
  Killing Reader -- something no engineer would ever do -- was already proof that the engineers are no longer in charge
  • sgustard 13y ago
    Would they approve a 20% project that aims to bring back Reader? Or would you be able to work on that without approval? Just seems like a lot of politics would be tied up in what people choose to work on.
• noonespecial 13y ago
  Right along with "anecdotes are not data" should be "long-term success is not made of little bits of short-term success".
• cupcake-unicorn 13y ago
  For what it's worth, I had a friend who worked at Google a few years ago and asked her about her 20% time. I was extremely underwhelmed, as it sounded like the exact same project she was working on from day to day. My idea of 20% time was always this really creative unbounded time to pursue ideas and things that are interesting to you, but for her it really just sounded like a logical extension of what she was already doing. It was just weird, given all of the projects in all of Google, with all sorts of interests, why would she just focus on the things she was already doing? If that was where 20% time was going, I don't think we're missing much.
  • plywoodtrees 13y ago
    Why? Maybe that was just what your friend found most interesting at that time.
• untilHellbanned 13y ago
  I think they are doing ok and will continue to do ok with "side-projects": Google Fiber, Google Glass, Google Cars.
• grandalf 13y ago
  There are a few other signs that Google is freaking out about wasting money. - search in Gmail is actually losing functionality. - hemming and hawing about the NSA scandal (not wanting to risk irritating political leaders) - ending free google apps tier - ending google reader - ending 20% time
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• mcmillion 13y ago
  Good. Now they just need to spend that extra time fixing bugs in most of their software.
• MichaelMoser123 13y ago
  I think that due to new focus on google+ the company is now less able to adopt new projects, if the new idea does not originate from project management. With google+ all features have to be integrated, so simply there is also less incentive/room for innovation; things that stand out of the google+ user experience must be cut for the sake of consistency; This tendency is self enforcing: If there is less opportunity for the side project to make it then developers will be less inclined to follow through with the idea. So as an outside observer I can identify a cycle: less room for innovation breeds less incentive for an individual to come up with initiative. Management sees that its liberalism is besides the point, so free room for initiative is scrapped. Maybe google can still keep on to a culture of innovation in areas of infrastructure and research, but in a wider sense google+ probably did them in. Maybe that is the right thing to do: they have enough money to buy any start-up if it looks promising. I don't know which one is more cost effective: exploring ideas in-house or buying out start-ups; however if Google looks like any other ordinary shop then it will be less able to attract top talent. I would guess that the free food is not the winning perk that attracts developers.
• plywoodtrees 13y ago
  This doesn't match my experience as a Googler. I do 20% projects, and my manager has a 20% project. It helps keep things fresh and interesting and I get exposure to more of the vast ecosystem of Google stuff than I would see in my main job. I get praise and appreciation, and bonuses from other teams. I think it looks good on a resume, I learned something, and it builds a connection across teams. I know the things I'm doing are helping Google as a whole. People are always going to have different feelings, and often mixed feelings, about putting time into a side project rather than concentrating on their main thing or doing something away from the computer. For me it comes and goes: some days I want a change and sometimes I feel too busy. How many of you who have startups would feel OK about taking time from it to spend Friday working on an open source project, even if you don't have a boss that's stopping you?
• cyberzeus 13y ago
  Lots of the discussion below focusses on the merits of MBAs, upper management, etc. - and while that is good discussion, I just want to add that the killing of this policy - if valid - is yet another example of our flawed practice of capitalism. Capitalism was never meant to destroy creativity nor innovation nor people - but our use of it does lead to those inevitability because of our worst human trait - GREED. Gecko was indeed wrong - GREED is not good - drive is - and they are not the same thing. We need to sharply change how we practice capitalism and develop, into all of our financial models, factors both for total cost impact (i.e. environment, people, etc.) as well as innovation. Current economic models in use do not look at these critical aspect of our existence and until they do, we're all screwed. Innovation and drive are what have brought humanity to this most amazing place in history - not cash (especially fiat cash) and not the hoarding of resources. I dare the management at Google to reverse course and allow their brilliant stable of top talent to keep the 20% perk - let a few Benjamins go for the sake of building awesome shtuff ("h" intended). INNOVATION RULES - cash - well, it's just dirty paper...
  • cyberzeus 13y ago
    After initially positing, I found the Quartz update and it seems the reality is that 20%-time has in reality become 120%-time. So it's the issue in reverse - the program is not officially dead, it's just smothered. In essence, Google is saying it's cool if you want to innovate aside from your core duties but do so on your time - the time that is taken away from your life and family. So the loud and clear message to employees is innovate with new ideas only if you are willing to make sacrifices in very important areas of your life - what a hugely bad move. Some might say, "Well - sacrifices need to be made to do great things." True - but shouldn't the main benefactor be the one who makes the main sacrifice??? Of course they should. In addition, 8h per week is likely not nearly enough time to incubate anything worth while so while the 8h is a great starting point, it is more than likely that folks would need to still use additional time to make any degree of progress. What should be done is to first decide your company's mission statement and if innovation is anywhere within and is at least on par or above profit, then you need to take that seriously and set incentives that move folks toward that goal. I was unable to find an actual Google mission statement but I did fined their philosophy page (i.e. "Ten things we know to be true") and it seems clear to me that innovation is definitely a core principle for the company. As to all those detractors who say the 20% has become basically screw-off time, maybe-maybe not. But the proof is in the pudding and if amazing things come out of the practice - as is the case with 3M and Google - then the screwing off is clearly at a minimum if there at all. For those that have an idea and wish to use 20% time to incubate, then restructure all of their core projects using a 32h week and pay them for 40h. My dare to Mr. Brin and the rest remains - don't just not smother the policy but rather, embrace it with a massive kung-fu grip bear hug. Make it a top priority for those with ideas to use 20%-time and incubate to the N-th degree!!!!!