121–130 of 498 posts
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None, failures tend to be abandoned early in most cases. Besides if you care about failure then you don't belong in the tech industry.
What a strange sentiment. We should all just not care about being successful?
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 any of my managers to not work on 20% projects; my performance reviews were consistent with a productive Googler.
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.
What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google's compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be. Certainly I, and many other Googlers, are simply super-motivated and willing to use our free time to work on projects that use our infrstructure because we're intrinsically interested in using these things to make new products.
20% 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…
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HR/MBA types value titles, buzzwords and other nonsense because most of them are incapable of actually parsing a technical resume. So, if you're going to look for a job, filling in your title as "developer" over a period of multiple years is a losing strategy.
By the same accord, without titles, buzzwords, etc as an engineer I won't be able to differentiate between resumes of a regular graduate level physics educator and one who is capable of nobel prize level research.
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 permission is needed.
"if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other companies, which reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of others, wise to continue trying to copy it?" That's incorrect, AFAIK 3M were the first company to pioneer this approach (with 15% of time spent on self-directed projects). For example see: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-day... Talking to a friend at 3M (who has been ther…
This way it is not goof-off time as it will not attract anyone except self-starters and thinkers, but the company is providing intellectual and material resources. You get to have fun, rejuvenate yourself on the job, the company contributes some, and maybe, just maybe, you hit the jackpot at some point. If not, well, you learned some stuff and had fun.
I curious if they did any cost benefit analysis in regards to declines in hiring quality when they removed such a feature.
They might have, and it might have told them it was the right thing to do. When I was in the Valley a few years ago, lots of people were quite convinced that top talent had already been completely chained to Google/Facebook/Twitter anyway, and there was no chance of poaching it away. If you follow that line of reasoning, there is no point investing in recruitment, at least locally.
I also wonder though if the real estate hyperinflation of the valley is a factor. It negatively impacts the ability to attract out of town talent when a "starter home" is one million dollars and a decent apartment is over $3000/month. It also impacts retention. I meet a lot of folks from the Valley and SF who loved it but "left cause they wanted to start a family" or "left cause they got tired of spending >50% of their income on real estate." You have either pay exorbitantly high salaries or expand elsewhere.
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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…
Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. Then "professional" management came in and killed the proverbial goose. They had to focus more on the "bottom line". To do what was easy to measure and track, rat…
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…
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 building a business, a piece of software, a piece of hardware, whatever. People are good at what they love to do. MBA people love to go to school and get pieces of paper that say "pay me I'm smart."
As a data guy, I have to go in and deal with these assholes all the time. I have hard numbers, they have hand-wavey MBA speak bullshit. It is probably the hardest thing we data people have to deal with: criticism from the "trusted advisors" who, due to the cognitive dissonance suffered by the executives who pay them loads of cash, are deemed to be intelligent when they really aren't. After all, what executive wants to admit that the man or woman he has been paying high 6 figures to advise him for months is actually a talented actor/mimic at best and an idiot at worst??
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…
At my current job, I can't get a port opened to make an OUTBOUND connection to Amazon Web Services.
Yeah, working at Google, it's definitely easier to use big tools to try new things, huh?
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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. This is the con of being a public company: a lot of cynicism. Imagine that you have inside information that Blackberry will revolutionize the mobile market, you will put money in their stocks and may be move on fast once it increases significantl…
I've had a speculation for a while that this is why Google, Apple, and many other tech giants like to keep their stock float small and thus their stock price per share very high. I wonder if it's a way of trying to select for longer-term investors. ???