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

qz.com

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

#31

Post by brunov »

tokenizer wrote: post #3

I curious if they did any cost benefit analysis in regards to declines in hiring quality when they removed such a feature.

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.

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

#32

Post by stormcrowsx »

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.

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

#33

Post by cyphax »

api wrote: post #28

"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…

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.

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

#34

Post by levosmetalo »

anxious wrote: post #27
ferdo wrote: post #11

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 incentiv…

Way to hijack the thread with anti-Google propaganda ...

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.

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

#36

Post by officemonkey »

donw wrote: post #18

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, rat…

Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate. If you don't keep innovating, you're going to lose your lead in established products (post-it notes, corningware) to China or WallMart.

Apple has a similar story with Android phones. Keep innovating or get your low-end eaten.

Google doesn't have to innovate. They're already China. If somebody makes something they like, they'll buy it. Or make a knock-off.

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

#37

Post by officemonkey »

levosmetalo wrote: post #34
anxious wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to hijack the thread with anti-Google propaganda ...

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.

I think he forgot the sarcasm tag, but it's hard to tell.

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

#38

Post by snorkel »

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.

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

#39

Post by hvs »

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.

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

#40

Post by betterunix »

smackfu wrote: post #5

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.

"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.

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