Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by cmdkeen » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:17 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #327

anonymous wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Early stage startup investors expect most investments to fail. Those investing in mature companies expect their investments to do well over many years. I'm sure MBAs have plenty of stories of incredibly inefficient companies that have squandered opportunities. MBAs aren't about growing startups, they're about taking the now $1bn Instagram and doing more with it.

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

#392

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:23 PM UTC

dkrich wrote: post #390

JPKab wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yep, absolutely correct. Well, save for Nike, which was founded by an MBA. Oh yeah, and Apple, whose CEO has an MBA and was personally selected by Steve Jobs. Well, now that I think about it, Meg Whitman, the current CEO of HP and former CEO of eBay has an MBA. And wasn't Bonobos founded by a Stanford MBA? I think Birchbox was born by a group of MBA's as well. Except for those and probably thousands of other exceptio…

[deleted]

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

#393

Post by ScottBurson » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #255

zeckalpha wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The examples you mention for 3M and Corning are valid patent reasons. If a company is going to productize their invention, they should have some protection. They are encouraged to innovate because of the patent process. The same does not apply to Apple and Google. Additionally, Corning sold off the Corningware brand to a non-research focused company. They've pivoted again, and their research (and relationships with A…

Which I suspect is doing Corning some brand damage. Pyrex(TM) used to be really tough low-expansion borosilicate glass, or perhaps properly tempered soda-lime glass, truly great stuff. Now outside of Europe and lab glassware it's non-tempered generic soda-lime glass, which is injuring quite a few people: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/08/pyrex.html

Wow! Thanks for that link!

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

#394

Post by yuhong » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:33 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #188

spankalee wrote: post #124

As a Googler, I can confirm that this article is... completely wrong. I don't have to get approval to take 20% time, and I work with a number of people on their 20% projects. I can also confirm that many people don't take their 20% time. Whether it's culture change due to new hiring, lack of imagination, pressure to excel on their primary project, I'm not sure, but it is disappointing. Still, in engineering No permis…

Michael Church (an outspoken ex-Googler) would disagree with you. One thing I remember him saying that was verified by several other Googlers, both current and ex, is that whether you are allowed 20% time depends on your team and your manager. And in fact, most teams in Google do not get 20% time, so you may be one of the lucky ones.

I think michaelochurch was pushing for things like open allocation and taking responsibilities for things like performance improvement away from HR.

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

#395

Post by bane » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:33 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #386

bane wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder what would be good professional management that is as close to general purpose as the old MBAs.

I'm of the opinion that the entire discipline is in need of a reboot. History has shown that most of the research into the management science bits is of an extremely poor quality and the field is in such a state of denial that they simply can't accept this.

One of the major issues is the concept that a person, with no specific experience of understanding of a certain industry can take a couple years of generic administration courses and get slapped into a VP role in any given company. This concept extends down to the worker bees in that the assumption is made that workers are fungible.

I think this is a fundamental flaw in current management theory that needs to be burned out of the entire field with extreme prejudice. It colors the entire field and I believe is the root cause of most of the major failures in the field.

The case of John Scully is a particularly notable example.

There are some schools that have toyed around with industry focused management degrees, a step in the right direction. You can learn how to manage a business in a particular kind of field...managing professional services in a software vertical is unbelievably different from managing the R&D division for a major cosmetics company, managing a small company is unbelievably different from managing in a megacorp.

I think also that MBAs simply shouldn't be available until a person has a few years of industry experience under their belt -- much like executive MBAs are today.

I think at the very least, because of the damage a shitty MBA student can do in the world, it should require industry specific professional certification that needs to be maintained and has an ethics bar like becoming a lawyer to self-censure particularly bad apples.

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

#396

Post by seunosewa » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:40 PM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #97

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…

He probably meant Google Buzz, which was an unmitigated failure. Orkut, all things considered, is actually reasonably successful.

For what it's worth, I really loved Google Buzz, and all the techies I knew used it, but we didn't migrate to Google+ when Google Buzz was discontinued. We were just very sad.

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

#397

Post by varelse » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:40 PM UTC

astral303 wrote: post #322

ishansharma wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll go even further and state that the problem is using MBAs to formulate how to manage creative sorts cough agile cough cargo-cult coding cough. if the area under your productivity curve is greater than everyone else around you, I don't give a you-know-what about the shape of the curve, you're doing just fine.

To be fair to agile though, I can see situations where it can work. The problem is that many of its adherents seem to see agile as a hammer and all software engineering as various forms of nails.

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

#398

Post by yuhong » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:40 PM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #212

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 don't think it's the MBA degree itself that causes this. Most MBA programs go very heavily into the idea of culture and competitive advantage - and obviously stopping a core part of your culture like the 20% time would be against what most MBAs are taught. This problem has nothing to do with education and everything to do with short term professional management that is compensated based on short term results. If yo…

I think executive hiring practices like competing based on references certainly don't help either.

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

#399

Post by yuhong » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:42 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #395

yuhong wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would be good professional management that is as close to general purpose as the old MBAs.

I'm of the opinion that the entire discipline is in need of a reboot. History has shown that most of the research into the management science bits is of an extremely poor quality and the field is in such a state of denial that they simply can't accept this. One of the major issues is the concept that a person, with no specific experience of understanding of a certain industry can take a couple years of generic admini…

One of the major issues is the concept that a person, with no specific experience of understanding of a certain industry can take a couple years of generic administration courses and get slapped into a VP role in any given company.

My point is that I am curious if it is possible to change things so such a person won't be bad for the company after being slapped into the role.

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

#400

Post by jjwiseman » Fri, Aug 16, 2013, 8:42 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #273

spankalee wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, this is the type of thing that's impossible to settle, because yes, different managers and _peers_ might view things differently. As you know, but people here might not, there's as much weight on peer reviews as your manager's review. So what the article didn't mention (which is why I don't think they talked to that many ex-Googlers) is that if your peers feel like you're slacking your perf score will be lower,…

Impossible to settle? Probably. Impossible to discuss? No. I'm not being critical of your account, I'm glad it has worked for you, as the manager of the engineering effort here I want to take the "good" stuff and use it, and leave behind the "not so good" stuff. So that is my agenda in this discussion, nothing more, nothing less. "In general the people I've seen take 20% time in a focused way tend to be the higher-pe…

My experience isn't directly about 20% time, but may be relevant to the question of who at Google is allowed or encouraged to innovate.

My previous experience is mostly in R&D startups, doing robotics and natural language processing. I was hired in 2010 and then found out I would be working on YouTube ads. I was disappointed, but decided to try to make the best of it. After three months I realized my lack of interest was going to be a problem, so I talked to my manager about trying to transfer. He discussed it with the site director, and the response was "we don't care" and I couldn't transfer until I'd been there 18 months.

I decided to stick around and see if I could work the system in some way, with the probably naive thought of trying to demonstrate my abilities and catch someone's attention that would help me transfer to a project I'd enjoy where I could make a real contribution.

During Innovation Week (a hackathon) I led a team of three other engineers working on an idea I came up with, and we won the "Most Innovative" award. The other engineers decided they all wanted to devote their 20% time to working on my idea.

My Tech Lead and my manager had no interest in my Innovation Week project, and I still had no way out of YouTube ads. Unsurprisingly my performance on my 100% project wasn't great and even if I made it to 18 months it seemed unlikely that I'd be able to transfer. I left after 17 months at Google.

I've mentioned this story before, and I hope I'm not just grinding an axe--I'm just telling my experience in the hope that it will inform engineers about possible outcomes of working for Google. I am fully responsible for my experience there, but I can say the priorities of the (large, heterogeneous) company were not what I (again, probably naively) expected.