Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
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Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#2I 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.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#3I curious if they did any cost benefit analysis in regards to declines in hiring quality when they removed such a feature.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#4Actually 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..
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#5Honestly, 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.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#6It 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.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#7And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#8This 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.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#9And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?
They probably didn't lose as much money as they're gaining from the successful ones
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#10And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?
Does this matter if the engineers and/or the company learn something from the failed project?
We under-value sincere-but-failed projects.