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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

#371

Post by aryastark »

dekhn wrote: post #122

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…

> Calling 20% time 120% time is fair

Every place I've worked has allowed employees to come in and work weekends on projects that would help the company. I guess those places just weren't innovative (read: arrogant) enough to rebrand it as an employee benefit.

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

#372

Post by mattw1810 »

deelowe wrote: post #349
voidlogic wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Gmail was the only major success to come from the program. Adsense, Go? I'm sure there are others too...

I don't think adsense has done very well. Does Go generate revenue?

While Go doesn't directly generate any revenue, it's probably not without reason that Google is rewriting some important pieces (dl.google.com for example) in Go. I can imagine their engineers being much more expressive in Go than in C++, causing them to spend less time on writing the code as well as resulting in simpler code (easier to comprehend and maintain, so less time/money spent on maintenance). This doesn't generate revenue but it does optimize development processes, which could indirectly save them some money.

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

#374

Post by cupcake-unicorn »

For what it's worth, I had a friend who worked at Google a few years ago and asked her about her 20% time. I was extremely underwhelmed, as it sounded like the exact same project she was working on from day to day. My idea of 20% time was always this really creative unbounded time to pursue ideas and things that are interesting to you, but for her it really just sounded like a logical extension of what she was already doing. It was just weird, given all of the projects in all of Google, with all sorts of interests, why would she just focus on the things she was already doing?

If that was where 20% time was going, I don't think we're missing much.

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

#375

Post by Iftheshoefits »

Silhouette wrote: post #172
JabavuAdams wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: productive people. We have this notion of the 10x producer, but the real problem is high variability within the same person's work. I know productivity superstars, but if you catch them on the wrong day or at the wrong time, they look like lazy bums. Over a year, they're extremely productive. On any given day, they may look like they're wasting time. This property of conceptual work is at the core of a lot of cul…

I know productivity superstars, but if you catch them on the wrong day or at the wrong time, they look like lazy bums. I've encountered a particularly nasty variation of this since Agile became a Thing, where anyone who isn't writing code or running tests or showing up in the commit logs every few minutes obviously isn't working. The idea that it might be better to step back for an hour, or a day, or even a month, to…

I had a manager who believed that such metrics were the only true measure of performance. This same manager also believed that CUDA on a VM (which is itself on a server hosting numerous other VMs, and the bare-bones minimum graphics card--so no support for virtualized usage of CUDA) was a good suggestion for improving performance, that running a debugger on a specially compiled Apache webserver in the production environment would be a great way to troubleshoot performance issues, and that having an 8-12 week sprint/"rolling release cycle" was "Agile" as long as we called it that.

So, yeah, some people just don't get it. At all. And in my experience management is definitely a place where one is more likely to find such people.

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

#376

Post by mynameisvlad »

pigscantfly wrote: post #348
jknightco wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Google's hiring standards have decreased, they've just shifted their focus away from inaccurate signals such as where you went to University and what your GPA was there. One could argue that Google's hiring standards have actually increased, as they're now hiring people who can demonstrate an ability to perform instead of people who were able to get a pretty piece of paper from Stanford.

Full disclosure: I'm a rising senior at Stanford, so maybe your comment is just irritating to me on a personal level. That said, the Stanford CS department is objectively very good; further, judging by the number of people I know who have abandoned or failed out of CS here, plenty of people wouldn't be able to complete the coursework for the undergrad degree even if they were all enrolled. I agree that hiring people…

Except that's really all it is. You might be fancy with your degree for a short period of time and land some interviews others might not, but it soon all goes out the window. The second you have some sort of industry experience, where you went to school and how you did there doesn't really matter.

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

#377

Post by [deleted] »

donw wrote: post #18

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…

[deleted]

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

#378

Post by Radix_ »

jmduke wrote: post #268
SkyMarshal wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>allows me to better interface with people from different backgrounds within a work environment. Personally, I like to relate to people, rather than interface with them.

"Personally, I like to understand problems, rather than grok them."

The two following comments are spammy but the only real issue with jmduke's comment was the form. Had it been:

>You could also say: "Personally, I like to understand problems, rather than grok them."

It would have gotten the point across that the grandparent's comment was an unfair dig at a style of speech rather than the content of that speech.

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

#379

Post by benched »

Philadelphia wrote: post #354
moultano wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was at Google for 6 months. Whatever you think about his opinions in general, he doesn't know anything about how things at Google work.

Not reflecting on this case specifically, but if six months isn't long enough for a new employee to generally understand how a company works, it would seem to suggest something's wrong with the company's culture, or at least with how people are brought on board. Six months is a long time in an industry where people change jobs every two years.

I consider myself to be consciously observant of organizational issues. I would say it took me about 4 years to develop a reasonably rounded picture of "how things work" at Microsoft, and then only from the point of view of a low-ranking employee. Big companies are vast, layered, intensely game-oriented social universes.

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

#380

Post by jlgreco »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #358
api wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think that the people who are best at building things that people want don't want to get an MBA." I know MBA school will be the first thing I do in hell.

GMAFB, you're just showing a personal hatred and stereotypical perspective, stop being so melodramatic. Incredible things have come from MBAs. You're being ignorant.

> Incredible things have come from MBAs.

You're all talk and no substance; let's have some examples.

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