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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

#331

Post by alxp »

Spooky23 wrote: post #91
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…

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…

If someone is "less than productive" you let them go. If they could use some improvement, encourage them to spend their 20% non-core work time learning and improving their basic abilities. Better to grow a less-productive employee who could improve than to roll the dice and try someone else, or expect anything to change while piling on a full workload of critical tasks.

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

#332

Post by digikata »

mynewwork wrote: post #288
api wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much innovation has come out of San Diego, LA, Fresno or Sacramento? How many tech workers moved to silicon valley from somewhere else after college? I'm not sure 'California mindset' is the right way of framing the innovation inside silicon valley.

San Diego is something of a Silicon Valley for genetics and other life sciences, LA is/was something of a hub for aerospace and arguably movie technology (it's more diversified now, but does have a Silicon Beach movement).

I'm not sure what objective measurement one could use to really determine "innovation", maybe economic activity from industries or products established within the last x years?

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

#333

Post by moultano »

enraged_camel wrote: post #290
spankalee wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because he made some massively incorrect assertions while at Google does not mean he is not worth listening to. Everyone says incorrect things sometimes. I mean, can you claim that you are right all the time? Probably not. I don't know him personally but I read the stuff he writes, and while his character can be a bit abrasive he's an extremely intelligent dude who can make astute observations and connections th…

He was at Google for 6 months. Whatever you think about his opinions in general, he doesn't know anything about how things at Google work.

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

#334

Post by typon »

cbg0 wrote: post #284
dekhn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it a lot. I eat about 10 meals a week there, have lost about 25 pounds, and I hate going out to restaurants because you have to pay and the food isn't as good.

You're probably going to crappy restaurants.

I had an interview at Google (no job :(...), and their food really is excellent. It can easily be compared to a higher end restaurant on Yelp (think $$ or $$$).

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

#336

Post by moultano »

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?

They may personally feel that they need manager permission. That doesn't mean that they do. There's also a wide range of managers with different opinions throughout the company.

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

#338

Post by wtracy »

epo wrote: post #301
craigyk wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 asham…

He attempted to explain why MBA behaviour is rational using the language of hill climbing algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing

He didn't express any big new insights, but there was an honest attempt to impart information behind that post.

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

#339

Post by api »

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…

Part of the problem is that it's immensely difficult to do science with people.

The hardest of the social sciences will create experiments where they try to study a single variable, like a person's reaction to a specific set of stimuli or decision making under a certain specific set of conditions. That way you can at least pretend to control for things.

It is simply impossible to do this in management. There are millions of variables. You can't know them all, control them, or do multiple runs of an experiment.

One of the more recent management fads has been complex systems simulation -- trying to do computer simulations of difficult managerial problems. This can work for logistics, routing, and mechanistic process optimization, but you can't reduce human beings to "agents" in a model.

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

#340

Post by cpeterso »

digikata wrote: post #332
mynewwork wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much innovation has come out of San Diego, LA, Fresno or Sacramento? How many tech workers moved to silicon valley from somewhere else after college? I'm not sure 'California mindset' is the right way of framing the innovation inside silicon valley.

San Diego is something of a Silicon Valley for genetics and other life sciences, LA is/was something of a hub for aerospace and arguably movie technology (it's more diversified now, but does have a Silicon Beach movement). I'm not sure what objective measurement one could use to really determine "innovation", maybe economic activity from industries or products established within the last x years?

And Qualcomm is headquartered in San Diego.
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