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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: 0.593s | source
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dekhn ◴[16 Aug 13 14:26 UTC] No.6224161[source]▶
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 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.

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1. lukejduncan ◴[16 Aug 13 23:25 UTC] No.6227445[source]▶
> 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.

LinkedIn'er here.

One of the things I love about our culture is InDay/HackDay. It works out to less than 20% time, but the entire company is given 1 day a month - generally the middle Friday - to do anything they want. This results in a lot of things ranging from prototyping ideas; learning new tools (I spent my day today brushing up on Scala); or just taking a fitness class.

The best part? The day is honored. It's not 100+n% time. Unless you own something that is bleeding money or users from a serious bug no one is going to come to you and ask you to do anything other maybe grab a beer.

I know we're not the only company doing this, I think Twitter has hack weeks every quarter, but it's a huge differentiator from our neighbors.

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2. chii ◴[17 Aug 13 15:05 UTC] No.6229267[source]▶
Atlassian does similar a thing every quarterly-ish, called Ship-It days (used to be called Fedex, because, you deliver overnight...but the real Fedex don't like it, so we don't call it that anymore), where you ship something over 24 hours (or 48, if you cheat a little and start early...), either by yourself, or convince other people to team up with you. Criteria is that you must have something that can be demo'ed, or better, shippable (or close to shippable). There's also prizes and presentations, then food/beer bonanza. Sure people put in extra hours, but i think they are willingly doing it because its also fun and quite a social activity, all whilst generating innovation and allow experimentation.