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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

#241

Post by agumonkey »

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…

How frequent was this scheme ? I bet all giants had this, Bell, Kodak ... Disregard towards little creativity bubbles can be harmful.

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

#242

Post by api »

DigitalJack wrote: post #151
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…

" I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school" You went to Mizzou too?

Worse. The University of Cincinnati.

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

#243

Post by spankalee »

enraged_camel wrote: post #188
spankalee wrote: post #124

As a Googler, I can confirm that this article is... completely wrong. I don't have to get approval to take 20% time, and I work with a number of people on their 20% projects. I can also confirm that many people don't take their 20% time. Whether it's culture change due to new hiring, lack of imagination, pressure to excel on their primary project, I'm not sure, but it is disappointing. Still, in engineering No permis…

Michael Church (an outspoken ex-Googler) would disagree with you. One thing I remember him saying that was verified by several other Googlers, both current and ex, is that whether you are allowed 20% time depends on your team and your manager. And in fact, most teams in Google do not get 20% time, so you may be one of the lucky ones.

Michael Church is someone who is not worth listening to. He made massively incorrect assertions while at Google, and continues to after he basically talked himself out of his job in a very public way.

Engineers get 20% time period. You can be asked to defer it for a quarter. On the other hand, most don't take it.

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

#244

Post by atwebb »

rgbrenner wrote: post #74
aylons wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nonetheless the tradition allowing self-directed research continues at 3M - and this might mean using lab resources, or creating prototypes without getting approval. And get hours paid for it, even it being extra hours you wouldn't do other way.

"And get hours paid for it," I don't work there, but I feel pretty safe in saying 3M researchers are not hourly employees.

But it could correspond to other benefits such as applying the time towards paid time off or something like that.

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

#245

Post by SkyMarshal »

vitobcn wrote: post #216
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…

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.…

>allows me to better interface with people from different backgrounds within a work environment.

Personally, I like to relate to people, rather than interface with them.

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

#246

Post by api »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #163
varelse wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1,000x yes! My productivity comes in intense bursts of effort, with quiescent periods of research and reflection between them (or what looks like goofing off to rigidly process-oriented sorts). Combine that variability with mandatory daily scrum meetings and it makes me want to figuratively slit my wrists.

I'll even go a step further. I have a reputation as one of those people who has an ability to get things done at an incredible pace, but there's definitely days where I'm flat-out procrastinating and being lazy. For me, personally, and I suspect other people like me, it comes down to an ability to perform remarkably well under pressure, along with a lack of ability to perform well when the pressure is off. If there's…

Me too. My productivity curve looks very rocky, with very tall spikes -- huge amounts of very hard stuff done in hours -- and days where nothing happens. There seems to be a longer-duration cycle too. I have super-productive weeks and ho-hum weeks. Overall the average is decently high.

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

#247

Post by lmm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #221
api wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USSR they were called apparatchiks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik It's sort of funny how Soviet business culture actually is.

> It's sort of funny how Soviet business culture actually is. Capitalist heirarchies look like state heirarchies in a system widely criticized as being "State Capitalism". Funny to the people who think that the Soviet Union represents the polar opposite of capitalism, expected by the left-libertarians who noted that the Soviet Union recapitulated the features of capitalism central to the socialist critique of capital…

It goes more in the opposite direction I think. "The Firm" has a centrally planned economy that in the case of an organization like Google can easily be as big as a small country. So it naturally tends to behave the same way as any other large centrally planned economy.

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

#248

Post by graeme »

This is the opposite of Black Swan farming.

With any project like 20% time, you should expect that almost everything produced will be worthless. So what? All you need are 1-2 big hits to justify the entire program.

Letting employees work on what they think will be valuable is a bottom up approach that can reveal knowledge that's inaccessible to managers.

Some comments on here say that the program 'only' created Gmail. That's been a massive success for Google. That + the smaller successes it has led to likely justify all the projects that didn't pan out.

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

#250

Post by api »

Anderkent wrote: post #66
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…

Whenever you see theoretically smart people acting in stupid ways you should consider incentives before deeming them idiots. The prioritization of short term benefits is an obvious consequence of reward schemes that judge you based on yearly performance. There is little reason to invest in things that help the company long term if your pay depends on short-to-medium term results, unless you think your company might b…

True to some extent, but over time fields with deeply perverse incentives end up driving away smart people. Smart people see perverse incentives and think "that field would suck," and run away.

Large sums of money can draw them in sometimes. But then they generally do the job for a while, stuff their pockets, and then leave.

People don't stick around with enthusiasm at a lame party.

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