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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

#91

Post by Spooky23 »

api wrote: post #25
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…

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 proba…

From a management perspective, you're forgetting about the obvious: the less than productive people. The benefit of giving employees no- or few-strings attached time to work on whatever is clear. Things like GMail, Apple 1, etc. The "cost" is that people are doing things that don't necessarily contribute to the bottom line -- for every GMail, there are 1,000 low-impact ideas.

When your ability to make money hand over fist starts to get challenged, it is difficult to continue giving people free reign, especially when your competitors focus on cost, cost, cost. HP was a great place that made oodles of money selling tank-like PCs (among many other things) that cost $3k. But then Dell came along, invested $0 in R&D and started cleaning HP's PC clock. Bell Labs was engineer/scientist nirvana, then the AT&T monopoly went away.

The other issue in big companies is that as people with direct connections to the business start losing control, the bureaucrats (well intentioned as they are) start moving in, and they worry about things that the engineers/etc didn't really care about. They are passionate about you using the appropriate powerpoint template, and will speak to your supervisor if you don't comply!

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

#92

Post by mathattack »

api wrote: post #25
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…

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 proba…

I wouldn't blame this on MBA-think. The folks doing it at Google aren't MBAs, and the 3M/Google/HP approach is treated as a positive case study.

It's an issue of central control versus decentralized organization, and where the company thinks innovation will come from. One could also argue you get a short term price bump too.

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

#93

Post by saalweachter »

g20 wrote: post #24

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…

Eh, from my perspective 20% time is both implicit and unwanted.

It's implicit because I'm not coding to a spec. I've got an area of responsibility and some general goals the people above me would like to see accomplished. If I have an idea, I try it out. I could see someone in a more spec-based, feature-driven role wanting to have time to work on their own features off the spec.

On the other hand, I personally don't want conventional 20% time. I don't really like working on two projects at once. One fills my head and all of my ideas relate to it and a second one gets in the way. I once again understand that some people can work on two things at once and enjoy it, but hey, I'm not one of them.

So I'm not sure there's an actual problem. If most of your engineers are like me, and are working with a great deal of independence on a project they find interesting, why would they want 20% time?

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

#94

Post by 6d0debc071 »

g20 wrote: post #24

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…

> What killed 20% time? Stack ranking.

This is just a "They did WHAT?" moment for me. Like, wow. Stack ranking >_< Seriously?

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

#95

Post by jimmaswell »

tomjen3 wrote: post #30
mattstocum wrote: post #7

And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?

None, failures tend to be abandoned early in most cases. Besides if you care about failure then you don't belong in the tech industry.

What a strange sentiment. We should all just not care about being successful?

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

#96

Post by wslh »

api wrote: post #25
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…

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 proba…

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.

This is the con of being a public company: a lot of cynicism. Imagine that you have inside information that Blackberry will revolutionize the mobile market, you will put money in their stocks and may be move on fast once it increases significantly the price. Yes, value investing is very interesting but how many daily transactions are based on this thinking?

I think there was a lot of bias in favor of public companies and now we are realizing that staying private may be the best option if you think long term and don't want to deal with massive conflict of interest.

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

#97

Post by tikhonj »

toyg wrote: post #60
jusben1369 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 userba…

He probably meant Google Buzz, which was an unmitigated failure. Orkut, all things considered, is actually reasonably successful.

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

#98

Post by jrockway »

[deleted] wrote: post #83
g20 wrote: post #24

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…

[deleted]

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.)

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

#99

Post by notacoward »

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.

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

#100

Post by JabavuAdams »

Spooky23 wrote: post #91
api wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proba…

From a management perspective, you're forgetting about the obvious: the less than productive people. The benefit of giving employees no- or few-strings attached time to work on whatever is clear. Things like GMail, Apple 1, etc. The "cost" is that people are doing things that don't necessarily contribute to the bottom line -- for every GMail, there are 1,000 low-impact ideas. When your ability to make money hand over…

Re: productive people. We have this notion of the 10x producer, but the real problem is high variability within the same person's work.

I know productivity superstars, but if you catch them on the wrong day or at the wrong time, they look like lazy bums. Over a year, they're extremely productive. On any given day, they may look like they're wasting time.

This property of conceptual work is at the core of a lot of culture clash with people who have more predictable work-comes-in, work-product-goes-out flows.

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