Yes because for innovation they have a separate unit namely GOOGLE VENTURES.
Sure, but 20% helps with innovation within Google, give googlers room for to flex their creative muscles, and is attractive to potential hires.
Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
451–460 of 498 posts
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Google doesn't give you anything for free; you give them data that allows them to sell directed marketing to you. I don't have a problem with that as for me it's a fair trade. But I wouldn't call what they offer as "free".
I believe that's also known as "TANSTAAFL".
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#453Earlier 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.
I'm a Googler myself and my manager has told us that although 20% time is ok, we should only do it if the project has some direct contribution to the core work we work on. Really depends on the team/department you work at, the policy is there to allow it, but different team have different culture. I believe it's more discouraged in certain departments such as Android and Social (G+) (those teams are probably under mo…
I agree it depends on the culture in each department. For someone already working long hours and under constant deadlines, I can imagine how they don't feel like they have 20% time. That's not a good way to work continuously, and hearing of certain departments or projects doing that to their teams is really saddening.
Personally, I did have very soft discouragement against wide-open 20% time. I asked around and a lot of people I talked to initially advised me against starting a 20% project so early, and especially against starting a new project rather than working on an existing one with engineers at a higher level than me. At least, they said, make sure I could get reviews out of it. That's not policy, but advice. People have their own theories about how best to get noticed and get promoted. Some of that has to do with 20% time. I guess if you're solely interested in promotion then you give more weight to such advice. I hope most Goolger's aren't solely interested in promotion.
I'm very glad I ignored that advice, both because I got to do very interesting things and because I got recognized for it, and I'm glad that I could ignore the advice because of our policy.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#454Earlier 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…
You're correct that there are smart MBAs, so it might be a bit unfair that "MBA" has become shorthand for something else. But it's not without cause. It's a stereotype with some basis in reality. The key distinguishing factor to me of MBA-think is a combination of posturing with credentials and cargo cult thinking. The essence of this thought pattern consists of thinking divorced from real-world referents. A striking…
It's interesting that you use Elon Musk as an example, since Max Levchin's interview in Founders at Work suggested that his only contribution to PayPal was to attempt to get them to switch all their servers over to Windows.
(Levchin, BTW, seems much more like someone who actually "gets his hands dirty" - which doesn't actually work out all that well sometimes, as evidenced by subsequent ventures like Slide that executed really well against a pointless market.)
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#455Earlier 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.
You haven't eaten there, have you? Their "cafeteria" is a bunch of kitchens worked by chefs. Good ones. Their food is the only reason I would consider working there.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#456I 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…
I work for a company that adopted 20% time a few years ago and the 120% time is true here as well. It probably works out to 110% time in our case, I can typically take a half day during the week and then nights & weekends. Really, I think the final paragraph is true anywhere. Every company has some cool data or infrastructure to play with and smart management encourages that hacking in a sensible fashion.
> smart management encourages that hacking in a sensible fashion
See, I don't get it. Management at my company encourages going home at the end of the day. I don't understand why I would work somewhere that expects me to work more than my 40 hours.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, and, unfortunately, he has a known history for creating sockpuppet accounts, which unfortunately makes me unrecoverably skeptical of anyone who cites or endorses his ideas.
Citation?
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#458Earlier 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…
> I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Google's per-ad revenue was down 6% last year. Ads are 95% of their revenue. They have huge data to see trends. Just because Google is still profitable doesn't mean that they aren't seeing a near future of red ink. Say per-ad revenue goes down 10% next year with the same costs and their profit goes from $10 bill…
Well, so they still have lots of money, and quite a lot of time to do something about it. It sounds like their core business is loosing to competitors, and their solution is to keep the old product (the one that they believe is failing) and cut research?
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#45920% time isn't dead -- I have been using it at Google consistently for over 7 years, and it has immensely benefited me. You don't need any permission, at least in engineering. However, I would agree that it is "as good as dead". What killed 20% time? Stack ranking. Google's perf management is basically an elaborate game where using 20% time is a losing move. In my time there, this has become markedly more the case. I…
Promotions and titles play a huge part in a lot of people's self-image, even at Google. While I was there, I heard more than a few engineers describe their near future goals as "Achieve level n by next year" instead of "build this thing" or "Improve this technology" etc. We liked to think we were better than "traditional" software companies like Microsoft or IBM but it was all the same. Corporatism and careerism as far as the eye can see.
Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead
#460Earlier 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…
> Bell Labs was engineer/scientist nirvana, then the AT&T monopoly went away.
And then the MBAs had Lucent finance customer purchases and count the promissory notes as income ...