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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

#431

Post by dylangs1030 »

jlgreco wrote: post #423
dylangs1030 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two founders of http://flightcaster.com (tech startup) both have MBAs. Matt Soldo, a serial entrepreneur who has worked in both technology and management and founded his own startups, has an MBA. He currently works at Heroku.

Incredible. Truly. I would have never guessed somebody with an MBA might start a company or work in management. Somebody with an MBA who also is capable of technical things? Stunning. You have opened my eyes; clearly getting an MBA allows one to create incredible things. These are incredible. Which one of us is wearing the SV blinders again? What have MBAs done, in the capacity of MBAs , that is incredible ? Founding…

I'm not wearing any blinders. That's the point. I have no loyalties or hatred towards anyone just because they have letters after their names.

My examples are meant to show you that your "Us and Them" mentality with engineers and MBAs is just false and doesn't reflect reality, no matter how many anecdotes people throw around on HN.

You asked for examples. I gave them. Now you're attacking me instead of my point. I've proven you wrong, bottomline. You just can't see past your anti-MBA bias.

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

#432

Post by dylangs1030 »

bhashkarsharma wrote: post #425
dylangs1030 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you implying that the tables have turned?

No, not at all. Just drawing a comparison.

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

#433

Post by jlgreco »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #431
jlgreco wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible. Truly. I would have never guessed somebody with an MBA might start a company or work in management. Somebody with an MBA who also is capable of technical things? Stunning. You have opened my eyes; clearly getting an MBA allows one to create incredible things. These are incredible. Which one of us is wearing the SV blinders again? What have MBAs done, in the capacity of MBAs , that is incredible ? Founding…

I'm not wearing any blinders. That's the point. I have no loyalties or hatred towards anyone just because they have letters after their names. My examples are meant to show you that your "Us and Them" mentality with engineers and MBAs is just false and doesn't reflect reality, no matter how many anecdotes people throw around on HN. You asked for examples. I gave them. Now you're attacking me instead of my point. I've…

Your best defense of MBAs is that some are capable of doing other things as well. You may as well tell me that dogfood is a perfectly reasonable meal for humans because sometimes you feed your dog your leftovers: "Dogfood makes great people food. See, here is some dogfood that also happens to be people food" "MBAs can create just as well as technical people. See, here are some MBAs who are technical people as well" "Chiropractors aren't all quacks. See, here is a chiropractor who is also a licensed physical therapist."

I can only conclude that it is as I suspected; you are full of hot air.

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

#434

Post by iyulaev »

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…

Not to sound arrogant, but I took a few MBA courses which included Enterprise Finance and Operations Management. There is some rigor to the courses, and I found the finance class in particular interesting and applicable. However, the level of difficulty was at least one order of magnitude below the engineering courses I had taken, when compared EE & Physics courses. Aside from some term memorization the math was really easy and "coasting through" was definitely possible if you're used to stuff like semiconductor physics.

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

#435

Post by Matt_Cutts »

levosmetalo wrote: post #385
guyzero wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transit directions on Maps started as a 20% project.

It's just one single feature of one of the projects. If that's the poster child of 20% projects then that's good enough reason to ditch them.

Transit directions have been a big reason why some people prefer Google Maps to (say) Apple's maps. In places like New York or Tokyo, it's a huge win for users. It's also spawned an open specification (Google Transit Feed Specification) that has sparked a ton of innovation in the public transit space, including real-time location updates from public transit authorities.

Full disclosure: one of the big leaders of the Google Transit project was Avichal Garg, who was a PM for the webspam team when he ramped up Google Transit in his 20% time.

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

#436

Post by BadassFractal »

orblivion wrote: post #127
Spooky23 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And then consider that Google's hiring standards seem to have decreased as they need a lot of people and not just the best. Thus 20% of more average people's time is going to be a lot less valuable on average.

And hence Google's slow descent into becoming what Microsoft is today.

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

#437

Post by jlgreco »

yuhong wrote: post #414
bskap wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Apple's founder didn't have an MBA. You know, the guy that came back in 1997 and brought the company from the brink of bankruptcy after it's collapse under the leadership of John Sculley, MBA.

So I wonder what positions the good MBAs tend to be in vs the bad, for example which kind are more likely to be big company CxOs.

Either it is a meritocracy for them, in which case we can draw some really nasty conclusions using people like Sculley, or they aren't operating in a meritocracy, which jives with the other accusations leveled at them....

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

#438

Post by lukifer »

anxious wrote: post #27
ferdo wrote: post #11

I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998: “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” “Advertising income often provides an incentiv…

Way to hijack the thread with anti-Google propaganda ...

Propaganda is nothing more than an idea that spreads (propagates). Or in other words: an idea.

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

#439

Post by varelse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #429
varelse wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that every incarnation of Agile that I've encountered is a rigid implementation of scrum plus sprint planning plus Jira. And this quickly becomes Waterfall with scrum. And it really sucks. While I agree that this is against the agile manifesto, that's no excuse. This is how it ends up getting implemented in large corporate environments, a lot in fact, so methinks the agile fans ought to take some ownership of…

> Except that every incarnation of Agile that I've encountered is a rigid implementation of scrum plus sprint planning plus Jira. This is not a problem with Agile; anything that works anywhere will lead to imitations that steal the name and attempt to extract some simple recipe from the "lessons" of that thing that worked. > While I agree that this is against the agile manifesto, that's no excuse. This is how it ends…

If the Agile Manifesto were just that and little more, I'd agree with you...

But instead it has become an enormous metastasizing moneymaker for minting Certified Scrum Masters, Certified Scrum Product Owners, Agile Certified Practitioners, and all sorts of other Agile titles for $1000+ a pop. So I guess we're going to have to disagree because I think this means a little ownership of the issues that arise in the practice resulting from that training is appropriate here. Because what I'm hearing from you now sounds a lot like the usual "You're doing it wrong!" refrain which accomplishes precisely nothing.

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

#440

Post by freshhawk »

dekhn wrote: post #353
driverdan wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

I'm not seeing any "generosity" on Google's part, at least from the examples you provided.

You certainly seem like a smart guy, working on some cool stuff, so I'm not surprised people are a bit confused (hence the term "brainwashed") by your (pretending to?) not understand the business model of the company you work for.

You are giving your time away, for free, to a for profit corporation. That's so irrational it's painful to hear.

If you like working with google systems and resources so much that you are willing to pay your employer to use them then ok, that's a bit weird, but it's your time. If you feel you need to work 120% time to keep your career on track then ok, that's not uncommon in this industry (but it's the opposite of generosity and it's not sustainable for you).

Framing this as repaying Google for "their extreme generosity" is delusional, which is why I'm assuming it's not the real reason.

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