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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

#321

Post by TDL »

RyanZAG wrote: post #266
SkyMarshal wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you want to blame anyone, you need to blame current financial thinking by most board of directors. I don't have an MBA, but my understanding is that this is what MBA programs teach, and is at least partly to blame for Wall St's, and boards of directors, short-term, bottom-line, quarterly focus. There are some people in the MBA world trying to correct that, one of which I know of are the Throughput Accounting [1]…

Not at all - MBAs teach company management and company finance. There really isn't anything in an MBA that would have anything to do with the job of corporate oversight that a board of directors handles. The board of directors are simply large shareholders who are put there to make sure management does what is in the best interests of share holders. In most large companies, these people are mostly made up of employee…

"MBAs teach company management and company finance."

This is inherently what the board of directors does. Furthermore, you characterization of the make-up of a board of directors is not necessarily correct. Many (if not most) boards also have independent directors, who many not own a single share.

"There really isn't anything in an MBA that would have anything to do with the job of corporate oversight that a board of directors handles."

This left me scratching my head, my experience was the polar opposite of this comment. In my MBA program the topic of the board came up a number of times in finance and management classes. The board & corporate oversight were very much top of mind issues.

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

#322

Post by astral303 »

ishansharma wrote: post #281
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…

I'm glad that I am not the only one. I had this impression that I'm a bad developer because I'm not consistent. During my internship, I did quite a lot of work but in similar manner. Implement an interesting feature, then a week of laziness. Another feature and laziness. However the other replies to your comment also make me afraid about some psychological problem. I think I need to visit a doctor! :)

The difference between lazy people and people with a disorder is that lazy people don't feel bad about not getting work done.

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

#323

Post by nine_k »

api wrote: post #209
nine_k wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my mind, it's exactly the other way around. When you're small, you need a source of revenue quickly, or you'll die. You don't have a luxury to experiment too much, you have to build one thing that works. When you're a huge company and have untold millions in cash, you can afford experimentation. In fact, you have to, because your revenue source is probably finite and you have to find another before the current sou…

Dead on. When you're huge and cash-flush, you have the luxury of really innovating in truly hard areas. This luxury is damn hard to obtain in a short-term gerbil-wheel economy like ours. Once you have it, throwing it away is like setting fire to a house as soon as you've paid off the mortgage or crashing your new luxury car as soon as you drive it off the lot. It is abysmally stupid and short-sighted. Investors shoul…

Actually, a few Googlers around me still participate in 20% projects.

But these projects need to be outlined, have OKRs and an estimation of potential impact, then approved. Not impossible, but far fewer and far less wild projects probably can now pass.

Well, let's see how it works; in a few years it will be obvious whether the stream of innovation dries up or not.

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

#324

Post by api »

jmduke wrote: post #282
api wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality distortion fields don't emit actual products that work. It's a field alright, and it does have some reality-distorting side effects, but there is actually a "there" there. If I had to boil it down I'd say it's this: (1) California believes in the future. People in California (stereotypically) think about what they can do tomorrow, building on what they have today. Everyone else thinks about what they already…

Reality distortion fields don't emit actual products that work. I'm not saying that a lot of great stuff doesn't come out of California/SV (just like Apple, for whom the 'reality distortion field' thing was first coined, also produces great products). The casualness with which you suppose that California alone is producing more innovation the entire rest of the country suggests that you're overwhelmingly focused on a…

I was talking about an idea more than a place, and should have made that clear.

The places where innovation comes from are going to be places that believe in the future, are open to experimentation and risk, and reason from first principles instead of cargo-cultism. It just seems like California (and SV in particular) has an above-average amount of these things.

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

#325

Post by jrockway »

calinet6 wrote: post #164
dekhn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lot of perks, including great food, but ultimately it comes down to: 1) awesome coworkers I learn from daily 2) access to infrastructure and few barriers 3) a competent IT team for corporate IT The combination of the three is rare in industry.

What I'm hearing is that the dream of Google has been reduced to some characteristic bullet points and a reasonably positive conclusion. This isn't a criticism or negativity, all things considered it seems to be a great company to work for; it just seems to be a bit more homogenized than it used to be.

I think you hear a lot of bullet points because it's hard to write a HN comment that describes everything about Google in one sentence.

Let me tell you a story from my recent experience.

My neck hurts from time to time, and as part of stopping that, I decided that one thing I needed to do was to not sit at my desk anymore. Fortunately, I already had a standing desk at work, so it was just a matter of using it. When I got it, I thought the best plan would be to gradually ramp up; 30 minutes today, 40 minutes tomorrow, until I was standing the entire day. That never happened and I think I maybe stood for an hour a day, basically bailing out as soon as my legs felt even the slightest bit uncomfortable. Last week, I decided that that was not going to work, and I mentioned this to some people that sit (well, stand) near me. They agreed to shoot me with Nerf guns if I sat down. I did, and they did, so I stopped sitting down. Now I can stand the entire day. What really did it was watching others around me stand for the entire day; if they could do this for months, why couldn't I? That's what really motivated me to endure the annoyance in getting used to something new.

So what does this have to do with Google? It boils down to: coworkers that care, coworkers that are "different", and the willingness to make expensive non-essential office furniture universally accessible and useful.

Ultimately, there are a lot of great reasons to work at Google, and HN comments can only give you a small snapshot at a time.

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

#326

Post by JPKab »

onebaddude wrote: post #254
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…

> "The top-10 MBA cult is awful." SV technorati pretentiousness is awful. > "MBA people love to go to school and get pieces of paper that say "pay me I'm smart." As opposed to some "Silicon Valley" types that don't have a clue about what it means to run a business, and say "pay me with investors money, I have lots of users!" > "I have to go in and deal with these assholes all the time. I have hard numbers, they have…

"This community is getting worse every day."

You've been in "this community" for less than 3 months according to your username. I'm not SV technorati, and I've run a business, as well as been a founder in a non-tech business that grew to 150 employees. I know business, and I know what I said is correct.

"SV technorati" is itself a stereotype.

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

#327

Post by bane »

anonymous wrote: post #308
bane wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Investors bank on most of their investments not succeeding, and the few that do making up for the rest.

The truth is, nobody knows how to bottle "success" and reproduce it -- but in a sense that's what management school is trying to do. With just the right management approach, applied in just the right ways, you can get Instagram instead of Color, or Google instead of Cuil.

The problem is that it's very easy to look at the failures and pick apart the problems. But it's very hard to look at the 1% that succeeds and figure out why -- and when it's attempted it usually overlooks the cases where the company succeeded despite having many of the problems the failed companies had.

Most companies succeed because of 90% dumb luck and 10% business strategy.

(hell, business is so screwed up people still don't understand how to define success. You see it here all the time that a "successful" startup is one that raises a huge round, not one that's profitable and growing...even BusinessWeek does this)

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

#328

Post by jarek »

api wrote: post #256
onebaddude wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The top-10 MBA cult is awful." SV technorati pretentiousness is awful. > "MBA people love to go to school and get pieces of paper that say "pay me I'm smart." As opposed to some "Silicon Valley" types that don't have a clue about what it means to run a business, and say "pay me with investors money, I have lots of users!" > "I have to go in and deal with these assholes all the time. I have hard numbers, they have…

SV technorati pretentiousness is indeed awful sometimes, and stereotypical MBAs do not have a monopoly on brain-dead business ideas. But last I checked SV and California in general pumped out more innovation than the rest of the country combined, and is preparing to colonize another planet and electrify transport. There is obviously something fundamental in the "California mindset" that differs starkly from the major…

> electrify transport.

Oh good, maybe you can show Europeans and Asians how to get around their countries without internal combustion engines.

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

#329

Post by TDL »

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?

"MBA is more of a place to socialize, not to 'study' things, right?"

What? Go take a financial statements analysis class and then tell me how MBAs don't "study" things. There are certainly ways to coast through an MBA program, as there are ways to coast through many things. Simply because MBAs don't have to go through the mathematical rigor that an engineer or physicist does does not mean there is NO rigor or requirements necessary to attain an MBA. There are many vacuous, over-confident, arrogant MBAs out there, but that is part of the human condition not simply inherent in those who go earn MBAs.

This broad (and widely inaccurate) characterization of hundreds of thousands of people is mind-boggling.

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