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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

#191

Post by AnonJ »

gaius wrote: post #144
JPKab wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are sooooo right on with this. The top-10 MBA cult is awful. These are usually those people you knew in high school/college who were excellent at studying for and passing tests. Excellent at getting great grades on projects. Excellent at everything except building ANYTHING. I think that the people who are best at building things that people want don't want to get an MBA. They instead choose to spend their time bu…

When we say a child is talented, we usually mean they are a good learner. When we say an adult is talented, we mean they are a good doer . But these are actually two different axes.

I don't really believe there is such a great divide. In a greater probability most of those who are "genius" in childhood will continuously perform better when they become adults, in all fields including "doing" things. Sure there are some prodigies who turn out to be quite useless in real-world scenarios, but those are really few, IMO.

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

#192

Post by null_ptr »

Maybe developers smartened up. If you have a solid idea that Google would benefit from and allow you to work on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do something similar on your own? Google is no longer a cutesy company, they're a corporation like all others, and most employees probably woke up and realized they don't owe it a single thing, let alone their brightest ideas.

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

#193

Post by cLeEOGPw »

"Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and the level of productivity that teams are expected to deliver assumes that employees are working on their primary responsibilities 100% of the time."

I know that it is a large company and control is required to manage everything, but this sounds depressing. I'm glad I work in a tiny company and even smaller team.

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

#194

Post by mindcrime »

jzwinck wrote: post #143
mattzito wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 boar…

"we can shift innovation to a focused group of our core innovators" It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what happens when someone on another team has a great idea? Do we transfer that person to the Innovation Department to continue innovating? What would that mean for their team left behind, relieved explicitly of responsibility, and implicitly of capability, to innovate? Maybe the whol…

It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what happens when someone on another team has a great idea?

Exactly. At the end of the day, anybody in a company can be responsible for a valuable innovation. This is why something like "20% time" is such a good idea in the first place. It avoids the trap of assuming that you can actually accurately select the people who "should" be doing innovative stuff.

OTOH, having a dedicated Research department where people spend 100% of their time on research and cutting-edge stuff also seems like a good idea. An interesting approach might be to have both "20% time" AND "Google X" but with a policy that allows the Hoi Polloi folks a chance to rotate through the dedicated research group on occasion.

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

#195

Post by bane »

api wrote: post #178
ssharp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think. This is a completely unjust attack. Quite frankly, I have no idea what "MBA-think" even is. You make an assumption that an MBA making a bad decision is making a bad decision because they have an MBA. That doesn't pass the test. Would the same person make the same decision even without the MBA? I always seem to get sensitive over the general MBA hate ex…

You're correct that there are smart MBAs, so it might be a bit unfair that "MBA" has become shorthand for something else. But it's not without cause. It's a stereotype with some basis in reality. The key distinguishing factor to me of MBA-think is a combination of posturing with credentials and cargo cult thinking. The essence of this thought pattern consists of thinking divorced from real-world referents. A striking…

> I wonder if this is because business borrowed something rather toxic from the post-1970s "postmodern" intellectual meltdown of the humanities? The worst kind of MBAbabble that I've endured over the years reminds me very much of postmodern literary criticism in its vapid, posturing use of language to hide the fact that the speaker is not actually saying anything.

You described easily over 75% of the management textbooks I had to work through when I was getting my management degree. Vapid & content free. It was shocking sometimes to be reading a few chapters in a row, and not even realize different authors wrote them because they all had the same "voice" of page after page of absolutely nothing at all to say.

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

#196

Post by cenhyperion »

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 really seems to be the life cycle of a lot of companies. Be small, lightweight and flexible, come up with great ideas that are able to quickly rise to the top. Those ideas make you tons of money and cause you to grow to be massive. But then you're crushed under your own weight.

We've seen Microsoft do it, I'd argue that Apple is well down that road, as you said we've seen HP do it, Google may be headed in that direction.

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

#197

Post by dragonwriter »

Graham24 wrote: post #131
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…

Side Issue: do Americans really say "penny-wise/pound-foolish"? I'd have thought it'd been dollar. And what exactly is a po-dunk school when it's at home?

> do Americans really say "penny-wise/pound-foolish"?

Yes, as well as the similarly anglocentric (but somewhat oppposite in perspective) aphorism: "Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves."

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

#198

Post by AnonJ »

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…

Second that. We engineers have our own perspectives but the management has theirs and it would be unfair to say ours are unconditionally better. If the management thinks in that way there must be a reason for it, and then constructive communication + concessions on both sides would be the real way to achieving a better end.

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

#199

Post by mindcrime »

null_ptr wrote: post #192

Maybe developers smartened up. If you have a solid idea that Google would benefit from and allow you to work on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do something similar on your own? Google is no longer a cutesy company, they're a corporation like all others, and most employees probably woke up and realized they don't owe it a single thing, let alone their brightest ideas.

If you have a solid idea that Google would benefit from and allow you to work on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do something similar on your own?

To be fair, not everybody is interested in running a company, and doing all the "other stuff" that it entails beyond writing code. Also, Google provide great resources and infrastructure, which it would be hard to replicate (assuming the hypothetical project in question required Google scale infrastructure).

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