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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

#301

Post by epo »

craigyk wrote: post #261
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…

MBAs are just trained to optimize around the the current maximum in the "energy" landscape. These maxima are all too often not the best in the landscape, or even worse, can vanish over time as the landscape changes. MBAs are like a gradient optimization algorithm without any simulated annealing process.

> MBAs are just trained to optimize around the the current maximum in the "energy" landscape. These maxima are all too often not the best in the landscape, or even worse, can vanish over time as the landscape changes.

> MBAs are like a gradient optimization algorithm without any simulated annealing process.

Now that is content-free babble. If you are a bot, more work is needed. If you are a human, you should be ashamed of yourself.

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

#302

Post by nostrademons »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #257

I've always wondered if one day a week was the optimum use of 20% time, given the need for extended concentration and flow to do really good work in software development. Google has had some success with it obviously, but I wonder how it would have worked had they done it by Quarter or semi-annually instead. Say, you meet a certain threshold in your performance review, you get a lump sum of ~20% of the time period th…

You don't have to do it as one day a week.

Personally, the way I've always taken it was "I've got no pressing tasks I need to take care of for my main project or for coworkers? Great, I'll work on my 20% project!" And I've found out that over my nearly 5-year career at Google, this averages out to pretty close to 20%. But there were weeks that I did nothing but 20% work, and there were stretches of 2-3 months where I didn't do 20% work at all.

We're evaluated over a long period of time and nobody really knows what you do day-to-day, so it doesn't actually matter all that much how you take 20% time, the important thing is what comes out of it.

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

#304

Post by anonymous »

varelse wrote: post #278
ryanbrunner wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Over the years I've come to realize that what once felt like procrastination is actually my brain working out the solution to a problem, and it quite literally prevents me from reducing the solution to code until it's damned well ready for me to do. So I just go with it now. The only thing that seems to speed this process up is intense cardiovascular exercise, which is probably a good idea on its own anyway (but I im…

Today I spent 5 hours staring at, stepping through some callback-heavy code, reading HN, browsing the web and about an hour to write, test and deploy about 20 lines of code fixing a really nasty race condition. And I'm still not completely sure things are really fixed. I might have spent even longer had it not become apparent that we have just the two options:

1. band-aid around the problem

2. complete rewrite of a large portion of the website

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

#305

Post by dragonwriter »

lmm wrote: post #247
dragonwriter wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The thing to understand is that the socialist critique of capitalism has always been that it is a system in which, both on the "micro" scale of firms and the "macro" scale of broader institutions, is centrally organized for the benefit of a narrow elite, with a distinct and well-defined (though, in the case of the "macro" scale, less formal than is the case in, e.g., feudalism) social heirarchy.

The heirarchical megacorporation existed before socialists invented the name "capitalism" to refer to and criticize the system which spawned such beasts, so the Soviet Union mirroring the heirarchical structure of such an entity -- with a similar elite vs. worker power relationship -- is exactly the USSR recapitulating features of capitalism central to the socialist critique, and not "the opposite direction".

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

#306

Post by officemonkey »

raverbashing wrote: post #107
officemonkey wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate. If you don't keep innovating, you're going to lose your lead in established products (post-it notes, corningware) to China or WallMart. Apple has a similar story with Android phones. Keep innovating or get your low-end eaten. Google doesn't have to innovate. They're already China. If somebody makes something they like, they'll buy it. Or make…

> Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate No, they don't "have to". But then they die, or just keep doing what they do. It's an option. There are boundaries that sometimes protect business: geography, client base, product specifics, etc.

I suppose I should have added "...if they want to continue to succeed."

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

#307

Post by medell »

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…

Two years ago I was in Colombia and had lunch with 4 late twenties MIT MBA students interning in Medellin. One was ex-Google, one was a consultant at the Big 4.

They'd been there for a week, and told me they hadn't seen any of the city. After work they'd go to the gym or drive their rented car to a restaurant recommended by colleagues. Taxis were a max $3 if you live anywhere in the core, which they did.

On a walk to a restaurant famous for mondongo, we had to cross a 4 lane street. It was 9pm with no traffic and after waiting awhile I noticed the crossing signal didn't go off. I looked both ways with no car in sight and started walking, looking back expecting them to follow. They all stood there awkwardly, with no cars and no other pedestrians, for another 30 seconds, waiting for the walk signal to turn on, while I watched them from the other side. The signal never changed.

They were scared of the city. Anyone who has been to Medellin in the past few years knows there is little to fear.

Not all MBA's are like this, but this group just didn't get it. I realize this is more about travel fears than business smarts, but there is something to be said for people that can adapt and embrace new environments.

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

#308

Post by anonymous »

bane wrote: post #298
anonymous wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But what about the people investing in these companies? Money don't grow on trees and you can't make money without products to sell.

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

#309

Post by falcolas »

jlees wrote: post #292
falcolas wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Frankly, I don't think that inconsistant application of rules, and relying on a good Manager is a good thing overall.

I don't want to equate this with working at Google, because I don't have enough information, but here's my anecdote about good managers:

Twice before I've worked with spectacular managers. They treated their employees well, and acted as great shields against the political infighting inside the company. But both times, the managers were forced out, and the employees that depended on them to get interesting work done ended up quitting as well.

If this is indeed, as the TFA posits, a memo from the top being filtered out by a few good managers, in a short amount of time those managers won't matter; they will be forced, or burnt, out. Neither case is good for the company.

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

#310

Post by phreanix »

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 sounds more ego-driven and self centric to me. Is that what MBA programs teach you? To be completely focused on your own solutions that you are dismissing everyone else's?
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