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

(qz.com)
581 points antr | 2 comments | 16 Aug 13 12:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.576s | source
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spankalee ◴[16 Aug 13 14:27 UTC] No.6224168[source]▶
As a Googler, I can confirm that this article is... completely wrong.

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.

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enraged_camel ◴[16 Aug 13 15:28 UTC] No.6224563[source]▶
Michael Church (an outspoken ex-Googler) would disagree with you. One thing I remember him saying that was verified by several other Googlers, both current and ex, is that whether you are allowed 20% time depends on your team and your manager. And in fact, most teams in Google do not get 20% time, so you may be one of the lucky ones.
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spankalee ◴[16 Aug 13 16:13 UTC] No.6224917[source]▶
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.

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1. Cookingboy ◴[16 Aug 13 23:17 UTC] No.6227414[source]▶
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.
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2. spankalee ◴[17 Aug 13 00:04 UTC] No.6227554[source]▶
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.