I curious if they did any cost benefit analysis in regards to declines in hiring quality when they removed such a feature.
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.
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…
A team of HP managers walks into the Svalbard global seed vault a week after the bombs went off. They smile contently as they sit down to their first meal of popcorn, to which they will survive for literally weeks longer than everyone else.
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…
Are those during working hours?
That's the important part.
"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-day... Talking to a friend at 3M (who has been ther…
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.
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.
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…
While Google does have a Borg-like aspect, I think they do still need to innovate.
What is more, it's clear the founders are still very keen to push the limits of innovation.
Maybe, as has been said by others, they are not shutting this down but restricting it. In effect, they're replacing most of the 20% time with acquisitions but they do still have the process alive to enable some internal innovation.
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.
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…
That's what Yahoo thought, 15 years ago.
Yahoo has been, on the whole, an astonishingly successful company; they may not have been as sexy as those we cover here, but they've kept plodding along. Stuff like this is why I think Yahoo will outlast Google in the long run.
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.
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.
Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?
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 cultu…
>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).