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"A lot of Googler reports 20% time is a bit of myth," I thought it could be accumulated and taken at at a stretch.
by plinkplonk 17y ago
"A lot of Googler reports 20% time is a bit of myth,"
I thought it could be accumulated and taken at at a stretch.
- stcredzero 17y agoI used to do that at my old company! And it was definitely an old company!
- CamperBob 17y agoHewlett-Packard?
- stcredzero 17y agoThat level of old, but not HP. It was actually the first company to exist off of 100% software sales/licensing revenue. (Not hardware sales, with accompanying software, like IBM in those days.)
- blasdel 17y agoSPSS?
- tesseract 17y agoDoes anyone know whether HP had anything like 20% time in its earlier days? I've never heard that they did, but now that you mention it it does seem like the kind of thing that HP might have done.
- CamperBob 17y agoOld-school HP was so awesome it would have made Google look like a Communist labor camp. As long as you did what they paid you to do, your time basically was your own, along with a key to the company stockroom. One (admittedly high-level) guy built a stereo amp -- http://www.hpmemory.org/news/barney_ampl/barney_page_00.htm http://www.hpmemory.org/news/barney_ampl/barney_page_00.htm -- and the company indulged him by allocating some surplus factory capacity to a limited production run.
- philwelch 17y agoI remember reading that Woz used his time at HP to invent the first Apple computer. (Then HP decided that microcomputers were a silly waste of time so they gave Woz back the rights to it.)
- pwmanagerdied 17y agoI'm pretty sure the major factor is your project manager; some are very liberal with how their managees spend their time, others require 20% can only be used for approved projects and set the bar higher than one would hope.