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

There is a reason the article talked to many ex-googlers because they are ones who, perhaps, left when there was a difference of opinion about their contribution to the company. And if that conversation attempted to use some of their 20% projects as a way of contributing to their contribution, and that was the disagreement, well it ends up with them leaving.

I left in 2010, which was the start of the lurch toward more managers, and those managers were being scored on what their team accomplished that was assigned to the manager, not on what their team accomplished on their 20% time. Some managers had taken that to mean that 20% time didn't count at all toward calibration, and if you were working only 80% of the time on their projects it counted against calibration. Hence the disconnect. That is why "120%" sort of works, even in the face of a manager trying to make their own number. Except the benefit sounds different if you say "And on Saturday you can work on any project you want." :-)

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?

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 making) metrics that are almost never good for long-term growth and survivability.

It repeats over and over and over again and it's especially frustrating when you're on the inside watching outsiders come in as VPs who's only qualification is a top-10 MBA destroy unbelievably large numbers of man-hours of work and turn thriving companies into joyless bean counting husks.

I remember vaguely going through my own management education specific moments where I stood back and realized what a smoking pile of self-serving bullshit and handwaving the professional management industry had become. Most of what we were studying was full of vague and meaningless, but impressive sounding, aphorisms and pretend sciency/engineeringy sounding talk. Management methods were described like bold scientific experiments but constructed of the flimsiest methodology one could come up with. I felt like the books we were reading were consistently written by flimflam men who had no consistent measurable success and wrote endlessly about management theory with the structure of those late night get rich infomercials where they talk endlessly about they're going to show you how to achieve success, but then never actually tell you. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages of it.

I've since tried to purge most of my management education from me. The only thing it really got me used to was a sense of comfort with sitting in front of spreadsheets all day, moving around millions of dollars, and writing status reports.

Technology has a viable lifetime before you need new technology. As a technology company, you therefore need to be invested in creating new technology or be willing to go in to the spiral of customer loss and only dealing with legacy systems before a slow death.

Statistically speaking, if you know most of your staff is intelligent and has experience in your market, you're more likely to get an outlier idea (one that is way off on the end of the bell curve, ie, actually really good) by casting a wide net, and listening to the bulk of your employees.

The problem is that to go anywhere, ideas need time to gestate and develop, so you have to give all those employees a little bit of time to develop new ideas for your company.

It's been a while since undergrad, but if you want, I could try to bust out an equation modeling (and predicting the expected value of) the likelihood you hit a really important idea in the wide-net situation versus the "dedicated research staff" one.