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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

#351

Post by enraged_camel »

moultano wrote: post #333
enraged_camel wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How long do you have to be at a company to understand how things work in it?

(That's a trick question, since the answer is going to depend on the person's intelligence and ability to make observations.)

Also, a ton of long-time Googlers agree with the stuff he says. It's not like he's some lone dissenting voice.

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

#352

Post by guyzero »

levosmetalo wrote: post #184

Did that 20% time actually bring anything useful at Google, or it's just a myth? IIRC, both Gmail and AdSense mentioned in the title didn't come to Google as 20% byproducts, but as acquisitions. Does anyone know of any popular (by Google standards) product that started that way?

Transit directions on Maps started as a 20% project.

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

#353

Post by dekhn »

driverdan wrote: post #346
dekhn wrote: post #122

I am a Googler. I will only speak to my personal experience, and the experience of people around me: 20% time still exists, and is encouraged as a mechanism to explore exciting new ideas without the complexity and cost of a real product. My last three years were spent turning my 20% project into a product, and my job now is spent turning another 20% project into a product. There was never any management pressure from…

> Calling 20% time 120% time is fair. Realistically it's hard to do your day job productively and also build a new project from scratch. You have to be willing to put in hours outside of your normal job to be successful. Then it's not 20% time, it's personal time you're giving to your employer for free. Why would you do that? Why not build your projects outside of Google and keep them for yourself (assuming it's a pr…

Why would I give my time for free to Google?

Because my entire career- well before I started working here- has been dependent on things that Google has given to me for free.

Like Google Search. Search helped me learn to run linux clusters effectively (it was far better than AltaVista for searching for specific error messages) which ensured I had a job, even in the dotcom busts. It helped me learn python, which also played a huge role in my future employment.

Like Gmail. Although I've run my own highly available mail services in the past, free Gmail with its initial large quotas hooked me early on. I have never regretted handing the responsibility for email over to Gmail.

Like Exacycle (my project): http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/12/millions-of-core-... in which Google donated 1B CPU hours to 5 visiting faculty (who got to keep the intellectual property they generated).

I would like to repay Google for their extreme generosity. Spending my "Free" time doing things I enjoy (building large, complex distributed computing systems that manage insane amounts of resources) so that Google can make products that it profits from seems perfectly reasonable to me.

If I had continued to work in academia, I'd spend most of my time applying for grants, writing papers, and working 150% time just to maintain basic status and get tenure. Anybody working in the highly competitive sciences, or in the tech industry, who wants to be successful, has to put in more than what most people consider a 9-5 job.

As for open sourcing: Google has a nice program to ensure that Googlers can write open source code. I haven't taken advantage of it, because most of my codes are internally facing and don't need to be open sourced. But I would certainly consider using my time to do that; I just think my time is best spent working on Google products because I believe their impact will be much higher.

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

#354

Post by Philadelphia »

moultano wrote: post #333
enraged_camel wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not reflecting on this case specifically, but if six months isn't long enough for a new employee to generally understand how a company works, it would seem to suggest something's wrong with the company's culture, or at least with how people are brought on board. Six months is a long time in an industry where people change jobs every two years.

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

#355

Post by PeterisP »

nine_k wrote: post #323
api wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If an initiative doesn't seem far too wild, then it's not wild enough to be innovative. Quite a few lousy ideas seem too wild initially, but pretty much all of the actually valuable projects are as well.

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

#356

Post by dylangs1030 »

JPKab wrote: post #326
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…

"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.

It doesn't matter how long he's been here. His statement about the community may have been hyperbolic; do you have a real rebuttal against the content? Or will you nitpick one sentence you can attack?

SV Tehnorati is a stereotype because he's drawing comparisons, he wouldn't normally make a steretype argument unless you had already. The point was to demonstrate a different perspective, and this entire thread is just demonstrating a disgusting level of stereotyping for a category of people - MBAs.

The bottom line is that there is nothing inherently evil or pejorative about an MBA. Judge human beings on individual merit, not on a piece of paper.

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

#357

Post by dylangs1030 »

api wrote: post #324
jmduke wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're making sweeping statements evidencing the superiority of one area in the world over any other place, and all you did was make a comment full of fluff and grandeur.

There is no "California mindset" just like there's no "Wall Street mindset" in New York. You're just being sectionalist.

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

#358

Post by dylangs1030 »

api wrote: post #145
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 think that the people who are best at building things that people want don't want to get an MBA." I know MBA school will be the first thing I do in hell.

GMAFB, you're just showing a personal hatred and stereotypical perspective, stop being so melodramatic. Incredible things have come from MBAs. You're being ignorant.

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

#359

Post by dylangs1030 »

TDL wrote: post #329
AnonJ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 require…

I can't believe the egocentrism so many engineers demonstrate when talking about MBAs. It's like the popular kids vs the nerds in high school. It's...sad.

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

#360

Post by mcculley »

AnonJ wrote: post #191
gaius wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we say a child is talented, we usually mean they are a good learner. When we say an adult is talented, we mean they are a good doer . But these are actually two different axes.

I don't really believe there is such a great divide. In a greater probability most of those who are "genius" in childhood will continuously perform better when they become adults, in all fields including "doing" things. Sure there are some prodigies who turn out to be quite useless in real-world scenarios, but those are really few, IMO.

Unfortunately I have encountered the opposite. I have worked with plenty of folks who were good at learning and very poor at getting things done.

Furthermore, I think that constantly being praised during childhood for being smart did them harm as it made them underestimate the value of tenacity.

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