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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

#291

Post by toyg »

jusben1369 wrote: post #260
toyg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I did mean buzz. I think Orkut was an acquisition if I remember correctly.

I'm sure it was a 20% but I could misrember, it was a long time ago.

EDIT: Wikipedia says "Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google. Orkut Büyükökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google. While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, In Circle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on In Circle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in Orkut that also existed in Circle."

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

#292

Post by jlees »

falcolas wrote: post #276
spankalee wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The policy is that you don't ask, you tell. If your manager needs you to focus on your primary project, she can ask you to bank your 20% time for up to a quarter, but then you get to use that saved time.

So, the employees and other sources cited by the author are lying about needing manager permission? Or are you in an unintendedly unique position?

It entirely depends on your manager and team. Some managers might want you to ask permission, and/or if you take the "forgiveness" approach your relationship with that manager might suffer. But that's because people are people.

I can't imagine my former TLM ever taking 20% time, but I can thoroughly imagine him encouraging every single one of his direct reports to do so, unless we were on a launch sprint.

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

#293

Post by therandomguy »

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…

MBA has nothing to do with bad decisions. Bad decision makers make bad decisions.

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

#294

Post by jlees »

Seems odd that nobody is mentioning Google's in-house makerspace, hackathons, and 20% weeks (where engineers without 20% projects, or who prefer time-boxed commitments, take a week once a quarter to work on stuff). I ran a 20% week project last year - or maybe the year before? - and there are several really fantastic people working tirelessly on the Garage and other makerspace stuff to ensure that the 20% mindset is alive and kicking.

I totally understand the "management killing freedom of experimentation" comments, but they are only one side of the story, and a side explicitly pulled from disgruntled Xooglers at that.

The Garage is one of the things I miss most about Google - both the makerspace itself, and what it represents. We hosted several internal hackathons there, both within and outside the intern season and had great success.

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

#295

Post by panacea »

jmduke wrote: post #268
SkyMarshal wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

"Personally, I like to understand problems, rather than grok them."

"Personally, I like people"

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

#296

Post by handojin »

bane wrote: post #186
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…

I say this as somebody who suffered through getting a professional management degree as well: I think the observed pattern is that we repeatedly see startups get kicked off, grow like wildfire, then turned into an empty shell of their former selves once the "professional management team" is brought in as they promptly kill off all of the reasons the company was growing in the first place in favor of short-term (bonus…

Matthew Stewart's "the management myth" runs with this thesis. Google it - the Atlantic article is a great read. He explicitly links the Tom Peters types with televangelists and self help infomercial pitchmen.

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

#297

Post by nostrademons »

grsites wrote: post #116
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…

On the other hand, focusing on a small number of great products is what Apple always did under Jobs. The first thing Jobs did when he came back to Apple was jettison superfluous products and concentrate on what Apple was good at. Seems to me like he was giving genuine advice.

He was giving genuine advice for himself. Apple did awesome with focus and top-down management because the guy at the top was Steve Jobs, who has an uncanny knack for sensing what the market needs. But companies are different: what was a core competency of Apple is something that Google doesn't have, and Google has various other core competencies that Apple never had. The general rule of business is "play to your strengths", not "emulate the winner".

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

#298

Post by bane »

anonymous wrote: post #289
api wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At one company I used to work for, I also saw my leadership completely lose their minds and fire off all of the development staff, thinking we could coast with a new sales team and the product we had and pull ourselves into profitability." LOLZ I watched this particular face-plant occur once as well. When they actually got customers the results were hilarious . Hilarious because I was not a direct employee, mind you…

Did the guys at the top ever lose any money?

What usually happens is that they've locked in some preferential options or stock grants + bonuses etc.

If the company hits it big despite them, the stock is awesome.

If the company does poorly they might miss a bonus but they'll still get their inflated salary.

If the company ends up on the rocks, they'll get their salary cut "till company performance improves" as their pay is usually tied to the performance of the company as an incentive.

But what invariably happens is that, even with their pay tied to company performance, the moment it gets cut, they high tail it out of there and land a new job with their top-10 MBA and another couple years of job experience...saying "I'm looking for growth opportunities" over and over again in their interviews.

I don't know if it's still true, but Facebook used to filter out these types by making them do a version of an engineering interview. Except instead of regurgitating algorithms you learned in college, MBAs had to regurgitate stuff from MBA school. Like derive the time-value of money, or discuss the TPM or whatever. The ones who coasted through MBA school got filtered out really quickly and the ones who took the subject seriously might pass the gauntlet.

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

#299

Post by joshfraser »

Larry Page had that chat w/ Steve Jobs where Page asked Jobs for advice. Jobs supposedly told him he had to start cleaning shop if he was to avoid becoming the next Microsoft. Page apparently took Jobs' message to heart as he immediately began unifying services and shutting down anything that didn't fit with the new mission. It's easy to see how 20% time was part of the reason things got so messy and it makes sense why they're scaling it back now.

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

#300

Post by ishansharma »

graycat wrote: post #285

There are a lot of good remarks in this thread. I will try to add a point I haven't seen here yet: Once I was in a big company with a big, famous research lab. The group I was in, just three of us, was led by a guy who had taken some technical work and published some papers. The journals were peer-reviewed but semi-popular so reached some ordinary business customers. The papers fit in with a lot of hype at the time.…

This whole segmentation is really bad. And from outside, it does seem quite simple.

This brings me to my staple question again: "How in the world those intelligent people with all those qualifications fail to understand something, well, dumber than paint?"

Or is it that majority of layers are full of unwilling/stupid people. I can see people being unwilling. During my time in internship, I became quite hesitant to touch any issue that wasn't assigned to me. QA guy didn't know much about programming and assigned features randomly. And there was no incentive for me to develop a feature assigned to someone else(though being curious, I did "snatch" a feature or two and implemented myself)!

I guess one weak point causes the problems and then they get amplified! That's how offices work.

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