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

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

#211

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

tmoertel wrote: post #208

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…

> 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. A lot of this "idiocy" is in fact rational (if unethical) behavior. At many large companies, upper management is rewarded for short-term gains. In response, these managers adopt strategies that produce short-term gains. If these gains can be bo…

> A lot of this "idiocy" is in fact rational behavior. At many large companies, upper management is rewarded for short-term gains.

The fact that microoptimizations that are harmful to the company in a broader perspective are rational on the part of individual mid-level managers working within the incentive framework provided by upper management, doesn't mean they aren't idiocy on the part of the upper management responsible for creating the incentive framework.

In fact, that means they are idiocy on the part of upper management.

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

#212

Post by RyanZAG » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #128

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…

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…

I don't think it's the MBA degree itself that causes this. Most MBA programs go very heavily into the idea of culture and competitive advantage - and obviously stopping a core part of your culture like the 20% time would be against what most MBAs are taught.

This problem has nothing to do with education and everything to do with short term professional management that is compensated based on short term results. If you want to blame anyone, you need to blame current financial thinking by most board of directors.

Of course, most of those guys are just in it for the short term too. So ultimately you need to blame the guys with money who give it to people who don't know how to invest. I'm sure most of us, including me, are guilty of this as well.

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

#213

Post by digikata » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

AnonJ wrote: post #185

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…

That's probably too far-stretched. In fact I believe conventional wisdom states the opposite, that those who get high scores in tests will likely be technical geniuses who understand how things work and do the hands-on stuffs, while those who manage are likely those who know how to talk but don't know how to study. MBA is more of a place to socialize, not to "study" things, right?

There's a cohort of people who do particularly bad in academic measures (especially the standardized testing sort that is in such fashion now), that are exceptionally good at what they do. I haven't seen a statistical study, but there are many, many anecdotal accounts of scientists, inventors, and businessmen who did poorly in academic settings but were brilliant.

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

#214

Post by api » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:46 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #172

JabavuAdams wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cul…

I know productivity superstars, but if you catch them on the wrong day or at the wrong time, they look like lazy bums. I've encountered a particularly nasty variation of this since Agile became a Thing, where anyone who isn't writing code or running tests or showing up in the commit logs every few minutes obviously isn't working. The idea that it might be better to step back for an hour, or a day, or even a month, to…

Agile / Scrum is the return of the K-LOC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code

People don't recognize it as such because the LOC -- lines of code -- has an added time dimension now and a different name. In Agile / Scrum it's K-(issue/day) where issues take the place of raw lines and the metric is applied per unit of sprint duration.

But same idea, and same fallacy. It results in gobs of ugly Rube Goldberg machine code that's slow for fundamental O(crap) reasons and bug-ridden.

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

#215

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:46 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #152

Spooky23 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Isn't that the motivation for the whole 20% idea, though? If you can produce 1 GMail for every 1,000 ideas, it probably doesn't matter if the other 999 didn't produce much of tangible value, because the programme almost certainly paid for itself just on that one success…

I agree. But as an organization grows, the points of view grow. People focus on their niche, and don't necessarily get the big picture. Also, the political environment in a company changes as the company grows, and tends to not reward speculative activity well. If you invent GMail, your boss becomes VP or gets more people/prestise/money/etc, If you invent Orkut, your boss gets to talk about how popular it is in Brazil.

One of the bad side effects of innovative, rapidly developed things is that the support org gets left behind. When the organization is small, this isn't a huge problem. When you're a huge company, the Exec VP of Support has an incentive structure to deliver better support. That VP will lobby for more controlled changes and slower product release cycles.

I've worked in places where most of the organization would be angry if some team invented GMail. They didn't welcome disruption.

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

#216

Post by vitobcn » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:48 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #128

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…

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…

I really don't see the need to stereotype, and even less to call names.

Personally, I have worked as a software developer, and I do also have an MBA, and I strongly believe that my broad/diverse education allows me to better interface with people from different backgrounds within a work environment.

Are there ways to obtain broad skills (technical, management, etc.) which are more time effective, cost effective, etc.? Maybe, maybe not. Each person is free to make their own choice.

However, back to the article's point, if Google's 20% is dying down it is ultimately due to Larry Page, who is clearly a technical guy, doesn't have an MBA (1) and most likely is seen as a "doer".

(1) According to wikipedia, he actually received an honorary MBA for his entrepreneurial spirit.

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

#217

Post by api » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:48 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #195

api wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 textb…

In the USSR they were called apparatchiks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik

It's sort of funny how Soviet business culture actually is.

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

#218

Post by null_ptr » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:49 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #199

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 quest…

I think that when it comes to an idea one truly believes in, even if one is not inclined towards running a company, one is likely to give it a shot anyway. I'm talking about real passion here. The kind of passion that would cause you to break down if Google were to decide that your 20% time is misused and make you do other things instead, or if your side project took off and was taken away from you.

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

#219

Post by endtime » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:50 PM UTC

varelse wrote: post #142

orblivion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then consider that Google's hiring standards seem to have decreased as they need a lot of people and not just the best. Thus 20% of more average people's time is going to be a lot less valuable on average.

While their standards have definitely dropped because they hired me in 2011, they then proceeded to assign hirees like myself to all the work no one else wanted to do around the googleplex. I suspect this was one of Larry's failed experiments because a whole bunch of the people I met were let go within a year. I personally fled the place after a couple months of trying and failing to find work remotely suitable to my…

If you don't mind my asking, what role were you hired for? Were you part of an acquisition?

I also joined in 2011 (SWE, normal hiring process) and my experience has been nearly the opposite of yours.

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

#220

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 3:50 PM UTC

winter_blue wrote: post #68

> 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. This meant killing off Google Labs, which had previously been Google’s showcase for its experimental projects—many of them products of employees’ 20% time. Guess who advised Larry Page to focus on a small nu…

I think it lines up with how Jobs ran Apple. He killed a ton of "blue sky" research projects after he took over as CEO, and Apple under his leadership spent a lot less on research than Microsoft or Google.