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

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.

Just because he made some massively incorrect assertions while at Google does not mean he is not worth listening to. Everyone says incorrect things sometimes. I mean, can you claim that you are right all the time? Probably not.

I don't know him personally but I read the stuff he writes, and while his character can be a bit abrasive he's an extremely intelligent dude who can make astute observations and connections that other people miss. I think you're doing him a lot of disservice by dismissing him the way you did.

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.

How long do you have to be at a company to understand how things work in it?

(That's a trick question, since the answer is going to depend on the person's intelligence and ability to make observations.)

Also, a ton of long-time Googlers agree with the stuff he says. It's not like he's some lone dissenting voice.

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.

Part of the problem with mchurch was willful ignorance. A few colleagues, including some fairly senior people, reached out to him and volunteered to try and help him resolve his concerns. To my knowledge he never took them up on 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 more constant pressure to "produce") than some of the more "old school" departments.

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.