
Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead - antr
http://qz.com/115831/googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead/
======
donw
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, rather than what was necessary for the next step of the company, and
now HP is a mere shadow of its former glory -- directionless and bleeding.

3M and Corning have largely avoided this fate, but it seems that Google won't.
This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a
lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will
continue to be market failures. Yet somehow, I'm incredibly sad, as it seems
that too many companies go down this road.

~~~
api
It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue
to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish
idiocy of MBA-think.

I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch
pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss.
But if you're not, you should be _investing_ and thinking long term cause the
other guys probably aren't.

I've seen a related phenomenon in the startup world. Watched it, front row
seat. I did a stint in startup-tech-focused business consulting. If you have a
top-ten MBA and connections you can raise millions of dollars, set fire to it
like the Joker in Batman Begins, and then raise millions of dollars again,
serially.

They were basically cargo cultists, mindlessly imitating the words, phrases,
and superficial behaviors of supposedly-successful people and businesses. But
there was no higher-order conceptual thinking beneath the surface-- no "there"
there. They had no plan and no plan on how to acquire a plan. They got the
money and then did a kind of mindless MBA rain dance until the money was gone.
Then they'd raise more.

I watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had _money in
hand ready to pay for_ when they were inches away from release. I mean a done
product, ready to go, and better than anything else in its market. A product
that they owned and had already paid to develop. The rationale was always some
kind of MBA newspeak blather. I can't even remember it since my mind filters
out sounds that imitate language but lack conceptual content. Otherwise I risk
wasting a synapse.

But what do I know? I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school, so what looks
obviously stupid to me is maybe _genius_. I'm not saying I definitely could
have done better, but I do think my probability of failure would have been <=
to theirs. But there is no way in hell I could get what they got. Not a
chance. I saw people try with better credentials than me and who were probably
much smarter, but they lacked whatever special magic blessing the cargo cult
guys had.

I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I guess nobody ever got
fired for losing their clients' money to a Harvard or MIT Sloan MBA. Nobody
with a degree like that could be at fault. It has to be the employees (I've
seen really good people get blamed for following stupid orders several times),
bad market timing, etc.

~~~
Spooky23
From a management perspective, you're forgetting about the obvious: the less
than productive people. The benefit of giving employees no- or few-strings
attached time to work on whatever is clear. Things like GMail, Apple 1, etc.
The "cost" is that people are doing things that don't necessarily contribute
to the bottom line -- for every GMail, there are 1,000 low-impact ideas.

When your ability to make money hand over fist starts to get challenged, it is
difficult to continue giving people free reign, especially when your
competitors focus on cost, cost, cost. HP was a great place that made oodles
of money selling tank-like PCs (among many other things) that cost $3k. But
then Dell came along, invested $0 in R&D and started cleaning HP's PC clock.
Bell Labs was engineer/scientist nirvana, then the AT&T monopoly went away.

The other issue in big companies is that as people with direct connections to
the business start losing control, the bureaucrats (well intentioned as they
are) start moving in, and they worry about things that the engineers/etc
didn't really care about. They are _passionate_ about you using the
appropriate powerpoint template, and will speak to your supervisor if you
don't comply!

~~~
orblivion
And then consider that Google's hiring standards seem to have decreased as
they need a lot of people and not just the best. Thus 20% of more average
people's time is going to be a lot less valuable on average.

~~~
varelse
While their standards have definitely dropped because they hired me in 2011,
they then proceeded to assign hirees like myself to all the work no one else
wanted to do around the googleplex.

I suspect this was one of Larry's failed experiments because a whole bunch of
the people I met were let go within a year. I personally fled the place after
a couple months of trying and failing to find work remotely suitable to my
skillset, which was, ironically, what led them to recruit me in the first
place.

Great perks, lousy work.

~~~
endtime
If you don't mind my asking, what role were you hired for? Were you part of an
acquisition?

I also joined in 2011 (SWE, normal hiring process) and my experience has been
nearly the opposite of yours.

~~~
varelse
I've gone on about this elsewhere (search my comments), but it comes down to
the utter stupidity of blind allocation for experienced engineers. There were
projects that literally needed my exact skill set, and engineers on those
teams did their best to try and open up a position for me on them, but middle-
level management and HR blocked all their efforts.

I could have stayed a year and hoped for the best, but by then I suspect I
would have been so embittered that I would have become the embodiment of a bad
culture fit so I left before that happened because I had a great opportunity
dropped right into my lap.

Now I suspect I am blacklisted at Google because a few people have tried to
get me rehired now that such openings exist and they were immediately shut
down by HR.

Whatever...

~~~
nostrademons
I'm curious - were the projects you wanted to transfer to in niche technical
areas or niche products?

It's very easy at Google to transfer from niche to core. If we (in Search) see
someone languishing in another part of the company with skills that we want
and they want to work with us, we make the transfer happen, and there's
nothing HR or another manager can do about it. It's much harder to transfer
from core to niche, and it usually requires a solid track record of sustained
performance in your original assignment. I know a number of people that
transfer from Search to Google-X after 4-5 years, but I know of virtually
nobody that can make that transfer after 1-2. (Basically, the company wants to
"make back" their initial investment in you before they'll let you work on
speculative projects that may not show a return.)

Arguably some of the niche projects would be better done as startups - they
don't face the constraints of working at a large, very visible multinational
where they don't get resources or attention from higher management - but the
entrepreneurial spirit isn't _quite_ dead at Google.

~~~
varelse
I was in a core technical area trying to transfer into another core technical
area in both cases (really, they needed me elsewhere, I could have made a
genuine difference, and the blind allocation process completely hosed that
up).

I also didn't know upfront that little tidbit that whatever assignment I took,
I would be stuck there for 4-5 years. If I had known that, I would not have
accepted my initial assignment, nor any other, until it was something I knew
I'd remotely enjoy, and I'd probably still be there today.

So by relentlessly focusing on short-term ROI, Google lost 100% with me.

If they're going to insist on blind allocation, then they ought to not be
surprised when it doesn't work out. But I gather the heuristic is to assume
these cases are a 100% indicator of non-googliness.

Again, whatever...

~~~
locacorten
Have you considered that there might've been an issue that you didn't know
about?

For me, I was with you until I read your suggestion to "read your comments" to
learn about your experience.

~~~
varelse
Does that really matter?

From my perspective, Google recruited me aggressively away from a long-term
gig where I had an absolutely stellar reputation. I uprooted my career with
the mistaken belief that they wouldn't do this unless they had a reasonably
clear idea what to do with me. Apparently they didn't and I'm not the only one
who had an experience like that.

Sure, I could have said no and I take full responsibility for saying yes and
for everything that happened as a result of doing so. And once I realized that
Google was going to be of zero help in fixing what I _think_ was a minor
allocation error, I once again took responsibility to do what it took to fix
the problem myself: I left.

So here's why I think they wouldn't help: the team onto which I was placed was
losing an engineer a month. Every time they got a noogler to say yes (3 times
during my short stay), another team would intercept them before they got to
their first day on the job. The work was dreadful and tedious and the manager
even seemed to hate running the team. And the only reason I said yes was
because I had this naive faith that Google wouldn't do something as seemingly
daft as blind allocation unless they had a pretty good idea how to make it
work. My bad. But not my problem. High level people should have been fixing
the root cause here instead of continually throwing nooglers into the pit and
expecting a miracle.

------
dekhn
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.

~~~
driverdan
> 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.

Then it's not 20% time, it's personal time you're giving to your employer for
free. Why would you do that? Why not build your projects outside of Google and
keep them for yourself (assuming it's a product and not open source)?

~~~
dekhn
Why would I give my time for free to Google?

Because my entire career- well before I started working here- has been
dependent on things that Google has given to me for free.

Like Google Search. Search helped me learn to run linux clusters effectively
(it was far better than AltaVista for searching for specific error messages)
which ensured I had a job, even in the dotcom busts. It helped me learn
python, which also played a huge role in my future employment.

Like Gmail. Although I've run my own highly available mail services in the
past, free Gmail with its initial large quotas hooked me early on. I have
never regretted handing the responsibility for email over to Gmail.

Like Exacycle (my project):
[http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/12/millions-of-
core-...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/12/millions-of-core-hours-
awarded-to.html) in which Google donated 1B CPU hours to 5 visiting faculty
(who got to keep the intellectual property they generated).

I would like to repay Google for their extreme generosity. Spending my "Free"
time doing things I enjoy (building large, complex distributed computing
systems that manage insane amounts of resources) so that Google can make
products that it profits from seems perfectly reasonable to me.

If I had continued to work in academia, I'd spend most of my time applying for
grants, writing papers, and working 150% time just to maintain basic status
and get tenure. Anybody working in the highly competitive sciences, or in the
tech industry, who wants to be successful, has to put in more than what most
people consider a 9-5 job.

As for open sourcing: Google has a nice program to ensure that Googlers can
write open source code. I haven't taken advantage of it, because most of my
codes are internally facing and don't need to be open sourced. But I would
certainly consider using my time to do that; I just think my time is best
spent working on Google products because I believe their impact will be much
higher.

~~~
freshhawk
I'm not seeing any "generosity" on Google's part, at least from the examples
you provided.

You certainly seem like a smart guy, working on some cool stuff, so I'm not
surprised people are a bit confused (hence the term "brainwashed") by your
(pretending to?) not understand the business model of the company you work
for.

You are giving your time away, for free, to a for profit corporation. That's
so irrational it's painful to hear.

If you like working with google systems and resources so much that you are
willing to _pay your employer to use them_ then ok, that's a bit weird, but
it's your time. If you feel you need to work 120% time to keep your career on
track then ok, that's not uncommon in this industry (but it's the opposite of
generosity and it's not sustainable for you).

Framing this as repaying Google for "their extreme generosity" is delusional,
which is why I'm assuming it's not the real reason.

~~~
dekhn
I worked in Ads for a year when I started here. I understand the business
model of my company quite well :-)

And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free". Free as in
free beer-
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre)

I'm certainly not "giving my time away for free": to be clear, I'm a salaried
worker, and I choose to work the hours I do. Further, to be clear: Google
gives me immense resources to carry out life-saving scientific research, the
intellectual property of which belongs to scientists (and the general public),
not Google.

~~~
freshhawk
> And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free"

And you would join a large number of people who have recently started using
that word to mean "can cost any amount in anything of value as long as it's
not currency". So sure, it's "free" in that way and still not free in the
definition of the term that's actually useful to people. Boring semantic
argument, let's drop it.

As to the rest, this is a much better way of phrasing it than in terms of
Google's "generosity", which is what I was pointing out as flawed.

------
g20
20% time isn't dead -- I have been using it at Google consistently for over 7
years, and it has immensely benefited me. You don't need any permission, at
least in engineering.

However, I would agree that it is "as good as dead". What killed 20% time?
Stack ranking.

Google's perf management is basically an elaborate game where using 20% time
is a losing move. In my time there, this has become markedly more the case. I
have done many engineering/coding 20% projects and other non-engineering
projects, with probably 20-40% producing "real" results (which over 7 years I
think has been more than worth it for the company). But these projects are
generally not rewarded. Part of the problem is that you actually need 40% time
now at Google -- 20% to do stuff, then 20% to tell everyone what you did (sell
it).

I am a bit disappointed that relatively few of my peers will consciously make
the tradeoff of accepting a slower promotion rate in return for learning new
things. Promotion optimizes for depth and not breadth. Breadth -- connecting
disparate ideas -- is almost invariably what's needed for groundbreaking
innovation.

~~~
6d0debc071
> What killed 20% time? Stack ranking.

This is just a "They did _WHAT_?" moment for me. Like, wow. Stack ranking >_<
Seriously?

~~~
g20
Well, actually Google has had stack ranking forever, since before I got there.
I remember my first manager (as a new hire) was telling me about this weird
ritual where managers got together in a room and talked about everyone and
wrote stuff down.

It is a bit puzzling to me that Google was pretty innovative in a lot of
areas, including HR policy, but the perf stuff is unimaginative and rote. Then
again, I don't necessarily have a better solution for a company of its size.

From a personal perspective I think it's great to give up a level and 10-20%
salary for increased time learning things. Google already pays at least 10-20%
more than other places which DON'T have 20% time.

From the company perspective, I think it is sad that 20% time is becoming less
and less relevant.

------
ferdo
I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search
engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998:

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to
providing quality search to users.”

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased
towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search
results.”

"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines,
search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText,
which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top
of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more
insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be
there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”

“We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is
crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the
academic realm.”

“Search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up
until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little
publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to
remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we
have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the
academic realm.”

>
> [http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

~~~
anxious
Way to hijack the thread with anti-Google propaganda ...

~~~
levosmetalo
Why is this anti Google propaganda? I can't see a single point that is not
reasonable enough on its own merit, and none of them applies to Google alone,
but to all search engine providers.

~~~
anxious
First and foremost it's off-topic. Second, these are the same citations used
by those who were pushing for the FTC to sue Google for antitrust, so they
have political baggage, third: it's before the company was founded so it's all
academic and theoretical with no actual experience behind it, fourth: context
matters - choice quotes from long texts have been used for Google bashing
before, some earlier this week even.

~~~
trailfox
> choice quotes from long texts have been used for Google bashing before, some
> earlier this week even

Somebody on the Internet is wrong and said something bad about Google? How
dare they! At what time did this serious offence occur?

------
spankalee
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

~~~
spankalee
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.

~~~
enraged_camel
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.

~~~
moultano
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.

~~~
Philadelphia
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.

~~~
minwcnt5
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.

~~~
yuhong
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5518156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5518156)

------
JamesCRR
"if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other companies, which
reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of others, wise to continue
trying to copy it?"

That's incorrect, AFAIK 3M were the first company to pioneer this approach
(with 15% of time spent on self-directed projects).

For example see: [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-
day...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-days-off-and-
created-an-innovation-dynamo)

Talking to a friend at 3M (who has been there 20+ years, an engineer with
dozens of patents) I am told that while 15% officially still exists, for a
long time it's effectively meant working 115% of hours.

Nonetheless the tradition allowing self-directed research continues at 3M -
and this might mean using lab resources, or creating prototypes without
getting approval.

~~~
Killah911
The author needs to google 3M an find out actual facts. It's like Google came
up with it and Everybody was in a mad rush to copy it. God forbid, innovative
ideas come from anywhere else but the companies we perceive to be the most
innovative. Google was keen to adopt the practice that's worked well elsewhere
and they seem to be focusing on other methodologies now, maybe they're figured
out something that works well for Google NOW. It doesn't make 20% time more or
less effective. It's just how companies evolve.

~~~
eli
Agreed, it's a silly question even if it were true that Google invented the
idea. I do not get the impression that Apple is a company that mindlessly
copies R&D strategies from Google.

------
pg
The title of this article may unintentionally embody a point about 20% time,
because GMail and AdSense have something else in common that Occam's razor
implies was more important than Google policies:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit)

~~~
kirinan
Are you saying giving gifted and talented people resources and means to build
things that they build amazing things? This is ludicrous!

To your point though, Google probably has many "Paul Buchheits" (by that I
mean at his level of intellect and ability), and so do many other companies.
Being on the end of having a good idea, and not having the companies backing
to build it, it sucks and discouraging. Thats why people make startups though
(or at least why I like to believe some people do), to take that idea that the
company didn't give them the time/resources for and build it themselves. One
part to show the company that they were dumb, but also because they believe in
the idea. I think as corporations try to maximize profits and throw things
like 20% time out the door, the world will see even more startups and I do
believe we are currently seeing that type of trend with the newer generation.
Ideas can consume people, and if corporations learned to harness that power
(Like 20% time and hackathons) they could innovate in ways that people
believed impossible.

------
nostrademons
I just launched a project, which made it to #2 on Hacker News, which was done
almost exclusively in 20% time. (Well, also a few nights and weekends, and my
manager gave me some time away from my main project to work on it, but it was
in all ways a 20% project. Self-conceived, self-directed, and done in addition
to my regular job duties.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209713)

------
akadien
This means that a lowly engineer with a great idea will leave Google to
develop it instead of developing it at Google. Perhaps, this is a good outcome
given the way Google keeps killing web services that people find useful but
aren't profitable for Google.

~~~
marknutter
But then what's stopping Google from just turning around and buying their
startup if it looks promising?

~~~
peacemaker
That was my first thought but then I realized that no-one can force them to
sell to Google

~~~
LanceH
They can't force in the gun-to-the-head sense, but they can "force" a startup
to sell with the threat of throwing a billion dollars at the problem
themselves.

~~~
ryanmolden
Because one can buy success? Like Google+? Or a lot of things Microsoft has
tried recently? I realize, all else being equal, a threat of a major
investment by a deep pocketed company shouldn't be taken lightly, but the idea
that Google can "throw a billion dollars" at a market segment and thus
dominate seems like wishful thinking by management.

------
zhyder
I'm a Googler, and comments here from other Googlers are correct: 20% time
still exists and requires no manager approval, but only a minority of
engineers take advantage of it. For instance, in my team of 14, only 2 work on
20% projects.

I haven't been at Google long enough, but I doubt there was ever a time when a
majority of engineers did 20% work. It's hard: you have to take away not only
time, but also focus from your main project (which like all software is
probably already taking longer to build than you'd like). Most engineers
aren't motivated enough.

------
vijayboyapati
I worked at Google from 2002-2007, and the dirty little secret is that there
is no 20% time. It's 120% time. You work a full schedule, and if you want to
put in extra hours for a side project go ahead. I explicitly asked to use
20%-time to work on a side project (i.e., literally take 1 day a week to work
on it) and was refused.

20% time has always been a great marketing gimmick for Google. I remember
interviewing candidates and mentioning it as a bonus to prospective candidates
- most employees mentioned it as a bonus because we were inculcated into
believing it was actually a bonus. It's much easier to see that it was never a
real perk once you're outside the bubble.

~~~
billnguyen
As a former Googler definitely agree with the 120% time. But I think its more
because its hard to do _any_ work effectively only once a week. So in order to
make your 20% time be useful you just have to put in more time than 20%. And
obviously you can't reduce your other workload so you put in extra time to
make your 20% project successful.

And for what its worth, I personally have never had a problem requesting for
20% time. Like all big companies, it really depends on your team and boss. I
believe your experience of straight out rejection is more the exception than
the rule.

------
api
"Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on
side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google
employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others
who have said it publicly.

What happened to the company’s most famous and most imitated perk? For many
employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to
work on independent projects.

This is a strategic shift for Google that has implications for how the company
stays competitive, yet there has never been an official acknowledgement by
Google management that the policy is moribund. Google didn’t respond to a
request for comment from Quartz."

What I've heard is more nuanced: the policy is not _dead_ , but it's very hard
to both satisfy the core demands of your job and maintain 20% time. So it's
not dead, but possibly not an actual _priority_ in the culture the way it used
to be..?

~~~
cyphax
You're quoting such wordings as "effectively no longer exists" and "as good as
dead", not "no longer exists" and "is dead".

The article seems to be pretty nuanced already.

------
winter_blue
> _Six months after he took the reins, Page announced that Google would adopt
> a “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy that would put more of Google’s
> resources and employees behind a smaller number of projects. This meant
> killing off Google Labs, which had previously been Google’s showcase for its
> experimental projects—many of them products of employees’ 20% time._

Guess who advised Larry Page to focus on a small number of projects? _Steve
Jobs._ [1] It seems like Larry's acceptance of Jobs' advice has sabotaged
Google. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but one does wonder if this was Jobs'
secret intention.

[1] See the second quote in: [http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-
jobs-advice-to-l...](http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-
to-larry-page/)

~~~
grsites
On the other hand, focusing on a small number of great products is what Apple
always did under Jobs. The first thing Jobs did when he came back to Apple was
jettison superfluous products and concentrate on what Apple was good at. Seems
to me like he was giving genuine advice.

~~~
nostrademons
He was giving genuine advice _for himself_. Apple did awesome with focus and
top-down management because the guy at the top was Steve Jobs, who has an
uncanny knack for sensing what the market needs. But companies are different:
what was a core competency of Apple is something that Google doesn't have, and
Google has various other core competencies that Apple never had. The general
rule of business is "play to your strengths", not "emulate the winner".

------
throwawaykf02
A Google recruiter, while doing his spiel, told me in a light-hearted, offhand
manner that some engineers call it "120% time". Having lurked here long enough
and read similar sentiments from ex- and current google employees, it wasn't
really news to me, but I was pleasantly surprised at his candor.

But do any of the other companies listed do 20% time? AFAIK, they only have
infrequent "hack days".

~~~
api
Yeah, Google still strikes me as probably a great place to work. 20% time is
not common in the industry, and trust me-- if you work for Google you work in
a much better place than your typical "enterprise software" hell-hole.

But this might affect their ability to attract absolutely top-tier talent.

------
acqq
The absolutely relevant Dilbert strip:

[http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/)

~~~
acqq
See also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725)

------
kyllo
Businesses don't live and grow forever. They have a lifecycle, and when they
get big enough and their business model becomes mature enough, they divert
resources away from risky innovation and toward defending the fortune they've
amassed, defending their primary cash cow products against competition through
anticompetitive practices like patent litigation, and promising steady returns
to shareholders. The problem is, this swing toward conservatism tends to
fossilize both the product and the organization.

If you fully de-risk your company, it will stagnate. No risk, no reward
either. And in Google's quest to kill Microsoft, they are becoming Microsoft.

------
btipling
It probably made more sense to have 20% time when Google didn't have tens of
thousands of engineers. When you have a few hundred really smart people all
working in the same building back in the early 2000's in Mountain View, it was
I imagine a different thing than it would be now.

~~~
datasage
I think there may be some truth to this. With a company as large as Google, it
may no longer be as beneficial to give everyone 20% time. Instead it's better
to take the best engineers (and probably most innovative) and give them 100%
time in Google X.

------
jlees
Seems odd that nobody is mentioning Google's in-house makerspace, hackathons,
and 20% weeks (where engineers without 20% projects, or who prefer time-boxed
commitments, take a week once a quarter to work on stuff). I ran a 20% week
project last year - or maybe the year before? - and there are several really
fantastic people working tirelessly on the Garage and other makerspace stuff
to ensure that the 20% mindset is alive and kicking.

I totally understand the "management killing freedom of experimentation"
comments, but they are only one side of the story, and a side explicitly
pulled from disgruntled Xooglers at that.

The Garage is one of the things I miss most about Google - both the makerspace
itself, and what it represents. We hosted several internal hackathons there,
both within and outside the intern season and had great success.

~~~
jarek
> 20% weeks (where engineers without 20% projects, or who prefer time-boxed
> commitments, take a week once a quarter to work on stuff)

Wouldn't that be 8% weeks?

------
diminish
Actually that's good news for startups.

Maybe current Google employees now prefer to develop their ideas in their own
startups rather than as part of the 20% program..

------
skittles
It's human nature to stop "screwing around" in order to get "real" work done
and make your boss happy. The only way to keep 20% time is to force everyone
to take it. If others on your team stop doing it, then the competitive balance
isn't fair anymore. If your boss can get away with unofficially taking it from
you, then she will. Something like 20% time must be in the company policies
with punishment for those that discourage it.

~~~
cousin_it
Wow. I never thought of 20% time that way, but it makes perfect sense. Just
like mandatory insurance. Thanks!

------
hvs
_Six months after he took the reins, Page announced that Google would adopt a
“more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy that would put more of Google’s
resources and employees behind a smaller number of projects._

There's nothing more soul-crushing for an organization than a board of
directors.

~~~
mattzito
I think it's not unreasonable for senior management at a company to say,
"Geez, you know, we have our fingers in too many pies". Sometimes their logic
is sound - they're distractions, they're consuming resources that could be
used on core business ideas, we can shift innovation to a focused group of our
core innovators. And sometimes it's not sound - it's purely about the dollars
and sense.

But to argue that the board of directors is what's soul crushing about an
organization seems odd to me.

~~~
jzwinck
"we can shift innovation to a focused group of our core innovators"

It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what
happens when someone on another team has a great idea? Do we transfer that
person to the Innovation Department to continue innovating? What would that
mean for their team left behind, relieved explicitly of responsibility, and
implicitly of capability, to innovate?

Maybe the whole company should be tasked with innovation, but innovators
should be allowed 80% time to write CRUD apps if they so choose.

~~~
mindcrime
_It might be easier to manage a separate Innovation Department, but what
happens when someone on another team has a great idea?_

Exactly. At the end of the day, anybody in a company can be responsible for a
valuable innovation. This is why something like "20% time" is such a good idea
in the first place. It avoids the trap of assuming that you can actually
accurately select the people who "should" be doing innovative stuff.

OTOH, having a dedicated Research department where people spend 100% of their
time on research and cutting-edge stuff also seems like a good idea. An
interesting approach might be to have both "20% time" AND "Google X" but with
a policy that allows the Hoi Polloi folks a chance to rotate through the
dedicated research group on occasion.

------
jrockway
I'd better stop working on my 20% project. I just wish I didn't have to hear
this from Quartz!

------
jfasi
As someone inside Google, this simply doesn't square with reality: just
yesterday I spoke to a friend about joining a project he's working on on a
twenty percent basis.

------
So8res
Bullshit. I'm a Googler, and I'm 20%ing today (as soon as I finish breakfast).

There's lots of pressure to focus and do well on your main project, sure. But
it's not external pressure, it's internal pressure. Everyone wants their
software to be great. It's hard to detach for a day, ignore the influx of bugs
and emails, switch gears, and work on something completely different. Most
engineers don't want to spend the mental overhead.

But speaking from experience, when you do choose that path you get nothing but
support.

------
smackfu
Honestly, this completely makes sense given how Google has been killing off
non-profitable products lately. Why pay engineers to work on projects that
will never meet a business case? This isn't the olden days of Google, where
they would shovel anything out there and see if it stuck.

~~~
zmb_
The same reason why a VC fund will invest in 10 startups knowing that 9 will
have to be closed down as failures. 20% time meant that Google was continually
making those bets in various areas, knowing that most will fail but that a few
will succeed in a big way.

They now seem to think that their management has obtained good enough crystal
balls to be able to determine beforehand which of the potential products will
succeed and which will fail. Meaning that they can scrap the 20% time and put
all their "wood behind the few arrows" they have determined will succeed (you
know, like Google+).

~~~
smackfu
It really depends on the real stats though. Because if only 1 out of 100 20%
projects is worth anything, maybe it's just not a good use of your engineers.
Like a VC fund with too low a success rate just goes out of business.

------
api
Just wanted to say one more thing: I've heard some Googlers say this is
accurate, and I've heard some say 20% time is alive and well.

Google is gigantic these days. It probably depends a lot on where you are in
the company. Two people in different Google divisions or even physical offices
are not going to have the same experience.

~~~
mathgladiator
> It probably depends a lot on where you are in the company

This means it's dead as a company wide policy, and it's problematic to be sold
during recruitment.

------
graeme
This is the opposite of Black Swan farming.

With any project like 20% time, you should expect that almost everything
produced will be worthless. So what? All you need are 1-2 big hits to justify
the entire program.

Letting employees work on what they think will be valuable is a bottom up
approach that can reveal knowledge that's inaccessible to managers.

Some comments on here say that the program 'only' created Gmail. That's been a
massive success for Google. That + the smaller successes it has led to likely
justify all the projects that didn't pan out.

~~~
chii
but the problem is that the incentivization scheme for a middle manager
doesn't align with what 20% time gives to the org.

Lets suppose you are a middle manager, and your performance is based on the
completion of projects assigned to you by upper management, and perhaps a
little bit of weight is given to the innovation your team cranks out in 20%
time.

If the projects you are given is either slipping, or is not achieving the type
of success that makes you look good (for the purposes of your own
promotion/bonus), do you allow your "resources" to work on 20% time, which may
bring very little benefit to you directly even if it is successful (it brings
benefit to the engineer, not you), or do you divert that 20% time resource to
projects that _do_ give you personal benefit?

------
hobs
I do not run a multi-billion dollar tech company, but I look at this and feel
a bit saf.

Some of the most useful stuff that has come out of google has been due to the
labs, and the people who work at google are supposedly some of the people who
are at the top of their game, who are now not going to benefit us with their
great ideas, just work on the "more wood" approach, which just sounds like the
google employees and google consumers are getting the wood.

------
null_ptr
Maybe developers smartened up. If you have a solid idea that Google would
benefit from and allow you to work on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do
something similar on your own? Google is no longer a cutesy company, they're a
corporation like all others, and most employees probably woke up and realized
they don't owe it a single thing, let alone their brightest ideas.

~~~
mindcrime
_If you have a solid idea that Google would benefit from and allow you to work
on it in your 20% time, why not quit and do something similar on your own?_

To be fair, not everybody is interested in running a company, and doing all
the "other stuff" that it entails beyond writing code. Also, Google provide
great resources and infrastructure, which it would be hard to replicate
(assuming the hypothetical project in question required Google scale
infrastructure).

~~~
null_ptr
I think that when it comes to an idea one truly believes in, even if one is
not inclined towards running a company, one is likely to give it a shot
anyway. I'm talking about real passion here. The kind of passion that would
cause you to break down if Google were to decide that your 20% time is misused
and make you do other things instead, or if your side project took off and was
taken away from you.

~~~
mindcrime
_I think that when it comes to an idea one truly believes in, even if one is
not inclined towards running a company, one is likely to give it a shot
anyway._

I can see where that would be true for _some_ people, but I doubt it's
universally true. And it may even be that it just makes more sense to do the
idea inside Google than doing it independently anyway. Again, look at the
resources and infrastructure Google already have assembled.

And some people may have just bought into the Google mission / vision /
whatever, and / or just feel a sense of loyalty to GOOG.

Anyway, I don't mean to suggest that it never makes sense to quit and do your
own thing. I mean, hell, _I_ probably would, as far as that goes. I'm just
saying that there are some legitimate reasons why some people might prefer to
just work within Google than quit and run off to start a new business of their
own.

------
leoc
Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the
decline of Sun Microsystems?

~~~
jusben1369
In all fairness 18 months ago the perception of Google is it was doing a LOT
of things but none of them very well. Embarrassing attempts at social networks
(wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) is just one example. So narrowing
their focus (still) seems like a good idea. But having great engineers is the
most important thing for any success so not sure why you'd take away a
mystical founding pillar of your culture.

~~~
toyg
_> Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm
forgetting)_

You mean Orkut. That was weird: it got wildly popular in Brazil, India, Turkey
and other places, but never really took off in "the West" (weird name, bad
quality when first released, boring UI...). I guess most of its members (it's
still going!) will become G+ users, so it wasn't a complete failure in the end
(in fact, a large userbase in developing countries is an insurance policy for
the future, if you can keep it going).

~~~
tikhonj
He probably meant Google Buzz, which was an unmitigated failure. Orkut, all
things considered, is actually reasonably successful.

~~~
toyg
Fair enough! I always thought of Buzz as a twitter clone more than a real
attempt at a social network though (which Orkut undeniably was).

------
notacoward
This doesn't seem all that surprising. You get what you measure. If Google has
been placing a greater weight on direct short-term contributions than on blue-
sky projects, and then putting employees in competition with one another, then
_of course_ employees are going to feel under pressure to reallocate that 20%
of the time toward the stuff that makes them money. Some persist anyway,
because of personal satisfaction or (much less often) sincere belief that what
they're working on in their 20% time will eventually win big for both
themselves and Google, but employees take those risks and make those deals at
_every_ company. The middle managers have no reason to support it as the
general case, and most employees don't have the backbone to force the issue.
Ultimately it's a bit like working from home. Some do it even at companies
that don't have a policy for it, and some companies that do have such a policy
don't really make it possible.

------
nappy-doo
Funny, I'm a Googler. I just went to the internal 20%-time page. It's still
there. Still looks about the same as last year, and the year before that.

Despite the rumors, I don't think 20%-time is dead.

------
tokenizer
I curious if they did any cost benefit analysis in regards to declines in
hiring quality when they removed such a feature.

~~~
toyg
They might have, and it might have told them it was the right thing to do.

When I was in the Valley a few years ago, lots of people were quite convinced
that top talent had already been completely chained to Google/Facebook/Twitter
anyway, and there was no chance of poaching it away. If you follow that line
of reasoning, there is no point investing in recruitment, at least locally.

~~~
api
Google is expanding quite a bit in Pittsburgh, New York, and a few other
locations. I wonder if this is why?

I also wonder though if the real estate hyperinflation of the valley is a
factor. It negatively impacts the ability to attract out of town talent when a
"starter home" is one million dollars and a decent apartment is over
$3000/month. It also impacts retention. I meet a lot of folks from the Valley
and SF who loved it but "left cause they wanted to start a family" or "left
cause they got tired of spending >50% of their income on real estate." You
have either pay exorbitantly high salaries or expand elsewhere.

~~~
humanrebar
Expanding in New York because of real estate prices in Silicon Valley? That
sounds nutty, but maybe I'm missing something.

~~~
api
Take a look. Silicon Valley real estate prices are unhinged. I mean like
frothing at the mouth, must be restrained or else he'll bite his tongue off
crazy.

 _Manhattan_ is similar to SV, but the thing is this: it is possible in New
York to find reasonable (for the local market) real estate within a reasonable
commute from work in one of the boroughs. It won't be the trendiest, but it's
going to be okay.

In SV you are talking about $800k or $2500+ a month for places that in other
parts of the country would be called a "crack den." Either that, or you are
going to be both far away and in an utterly dull, depressing suburb.

SV is America's only six-figure ghetto. There is nowhere else where so much
buys so little. Driving around on my most recent visit I was _shocked_ by the
squalor of these six-figure engineers and millionaires (relative to what you'd
get for that price in sane markets).

I'm not a local so I can't say for sure, but I'd be strongly tempted to blame
the anti-development political mentality. With growing demand and no supply,
this is gonna happen.

------
petercooper
There was a joke going around recently. "I work at Google and still have 20%
time. It's called Saturday."

(Yes, yes, the % isn't correct. It doesn't matter ;-))

~~~
nostrademons
10 hours on Saturday. ;-)

------
thehme
First, I was sort of annoyed that I had to "sign in" in order to read public
statements from former employees about the "20% time" being dead at Google.
Beyond that, I think few companies exists that just want to make great
products and know that eventually the money will come. In the meantime, most
companies are there to make money and if the numbers show that people are more
productive working 100% of their time on responsibilities rather than
innovation, then who can blame them - they want to make money. However, this
is Google, a mega company making tons! of money, so I expect them to encourage
innovation. In fact, someone I know recently interviewed there and the "20%
time" for side projects is something they seem proud to promote, so can it
really be dead? I think the issue may be in the managers/company EXPECTING
results out of this time investment, rather than seeing it as a way to
encouraging innovation that won't necessary lead to a Gmail or Talk.

------
ollysb
It's not like there's a shortage of startups to provide innovation so it
probably just makes more sense to buy the successful ones than speculatively
spend a fifth of their workforce on random ideas.

------
test-it
It's very logical. Back in the day G had very few, very bright employes.
Nowadays they have a lot more people, who are, on average, less intelligent
and have less will power. Which means the majority of G-ers today are
incapable of innovation and letting everyone take the Fridays off is a huge
waste.

------
argumentum
Seems like Google is splitting into Google-Page and Google-Brin (X Labs). I'd
much rather join the latter, but perhaps it wouldn't exist without the former.

------
EnderMB
I know it'd be impossible to know these stats, but it'd be interesting to see
how many (recent) ex-Googlers went on to start their own successful startup.
With that, it'd also be quite interesting to speculate how many of these
business ideas could have benefited by being "within" Google.

In many ways it's a shame, although I think most of us can appreciate that the
Google of yesterday is a different beast to the Google of today. One area
where I think it could really hurt Google is in recruitment. I imagine the
"20% rule" would have been a huge factor in getting the best engineers to work
at Google. With this news, I can see some of the magic of Google disappearing
in my mind.

------
at-fates-hands
I know a few people who have worked there over the years and they confirmed
the same thing - albeit with a huge caveat.

The two people I know said the 20% was a way for their brains to take a break
and think creatively. Nothing was too crazy or far fetched not to try out.
They said it helped combat the crazy hours and working from dusk till dawn. In
short, it helped prevent burnout. I would be willing to bet the turnover rate
will start increase as their employees start to work more hours, without any
breaks, and nothing to give them something to look forward to and burnout
starts to settle in much faster.

Sure, it's not going to make them go bankrupt, but it will have a real world
cost to their bottom line.

------
levosmetalo
Did that 20% time actually bring anything useful at Google, or it's just a
myth?

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?

~~~
guyzero
Transit directions on Maps started as a 20% project.

~~~
levosmetalo
It's just one single feature of one of the projects. If that's the poster
child of 20% projects then that's good enough reason to ditch them.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Transit directions have been a big reason why some people prefer Google Maps
to (say) Apple's maps. In places like New York or Tokyo, it's a huge win for
users. It's also spawned an open specification (Google Transit Feed
Specification) that has sparked a ton of innovation in the public transit
space, including real-time location updates from public transit authorities.

Full disclosure: one of the big leaders of the Google Transit project was
Avichal Garg, who was a PM for the webspam team when he ramped up Google
Transit in his 20% time.

------
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.

~~~
plywoodtrees
Why? Maybe that was just what your friend found most interesting at that time.

------
joshfraser
Larry Page had that chat w/ Steve Jobs where Page asked Jobs for advice. Jobs
supposedly told him he had to start cleaning shop if he was to avoid becoming
the next Microsoft. Page apparently took Jobs' message to heart as he
immediately began unifying services and shutting down anything that didn't fit
with the new mission. It's easy to see how 20% time was part of the reason
things got so messy and it makes sense why they're scaling it back now.

------
na85
Pretty sure this is false. My brother is a google engineer and he was demoing
a project for me that he and some other guy had been doing in their 20% time
over the last week.

This was yesterday.

------
pm
3M didn't copy 20% from Google. They were doing it well before Google ever
decided to do it.

------
MichaelMoser123
I think that due to new focus on google+ the company is now less able to adopt
new projects, if the new idea does not originate from project management. With
google+ all features have to be integrated, so simply there is also less
incentive/room for innovation; things that stand out of the google+ user
experience must be cut for the sake of consistency;

This tendency is self enforcing: If there is less opportunity for the side
project to make it then developers will be less inclined to follow through
with the idea.

So as an outside observer I can identify a cycle: less room for innovation
breeds less incentive for an individual to come up with initiative. Management
sees that its liberalism is besides the point, so free room for initiative is
scrapped.

Maybe google can still keep on to a culture of innovation in areas of
infrastructure and research, but in a wider sense google+ probably did them
in.

Maybe that is the right thing to do: they have enough money to buy any start-
up if it looks promising. I don't know which one is more cost effective:
exploring ideas in-house or buying out start-ups; however if Google looks like
any other ordinary shop then it will be less able to attract top talent. I
would guess that the free food is not the winning perk that attracts
developers.

------
stormcrowsx
Anywhere I've worked that says they do it ends up being more like 100% bottom
line and the extra 20% is expected to happen as extra hours. I work on those
"extra" projects during regular hours anyway. If I don't get to practice my
creativity, programming turns into a drag and I get less done. Most of the
time they happily deploy the extra stuff I make and I've never been
reprimanded for it even when the extra work was a miss.

------
cyberzeus
Lots of the discussion below focusses on the merits of MBAs, upper management,
etc. - and while that is good discussion, I just want to add that the killing
of this policy - if valid - is yet another example of our flawed practice of
capitalism. Capitalism was never meant to destroy creativity nor innovation
nor people - but our use of it does lead to those inevitability because of our
worst human trait - GREED. Gecko was indeed wrong - GREED is not good - drive
is - and they are not the same thing. We need to sharply change how we
practice capitalism and develop, into all of our financial models, factors
both for total cost impact (i.e. environment, people, etc.) as well as
innovation. Current economic models in use do not look at these critical
aspect of our existence and until they do, we're all screwed. Innovation and
drive are what have brought humanity to this most amazing place in history -
not cash (especially fiat cash) and not the hoarding of resources.

I dare the management at Google to reverse course and allow their brilliant
stable of top talent to keep the 20% perk - let a few Benjamins go for the
sake of building awesome shtuff ("h" intended).

INNOVATION RULES - cash - well, it's just dirty paper...

~~~
cyberzeus
After initially positing, I found the Quartz update and it seems the reality
is that 20%-time has in reality become 120%-time. So it's the issue in reverse
- the program is not officially dead, it's just smothered. In essence, Google
is saying it's cool if you want to innovate aside from your core duties but do
so on your time - the time that is taken away from your life and family. So
the loud and clear message to employees is innovate with new ideas only if you
are willing to make sacrifices in very important areas of your life - what a
hugely bad move. Some might say, "Well - sacrifices need to be made to do
great things." True - but shouldn't the main benefactor be the one who makes
the main sacrifice??? Of course they should. In addition, 8h per week is
likely not nearly enough time to incubate anything worth while so while the 8h
is a great starting point, it is more than likely that folks would need to
still use additional time to make any degree of progress.

What should be done is to first decide your company's mission statement and if
innovation is anywhere within and is at least on par or above profit, then you
need to take that seriously and set incentives that move folks toward that
goal. I was unable to find an actual Google mission statement but I did fined
their philosophy page (i.e. "Ten things we know to be true") and it seems
clear to me that innovation is definitely a core principle for the company.

As to all those detractors who say the 20% has become basically screw-off
time, maybe-maybe not. But the proof is in the pudding and if amazing things
come out of the practice - as is the case with 3M and Google - then the
screwing off is clearly at a minimum if there at all.

For those that have an idea and wish to use 20% time to incubate, then
restructure all of their core projects using a 32h week and pay them for 40h.

My dare to Mr. Brin and the rest remains - don't just not smother the policy
but rather, embrace it with a massive kung-fu grip bear hug. Make it a top
priority for those with ideas to use 20%-time and incubate to the N-th
degree!!!!!

------
zerooneinfinity
I can confirm this. When I went on interview at Google and asked various
engineers what they did for their 20% time they all said they didn't have time
for it.

------
cygwin98
Does it mean that we reach _peak Google_ now?

------
plywoodtrees
This doesn't match my experience as a Googler. I do 20% projects, and my
manager has a 20% project. It helps keep things fresh and interesting and I
get exposure to more of the vast ecosystem of Google stuff than I would see in
my main job.

I get praise and appreciation, and bonuses from other teams. I think it looks
good on a resume, I learned something, and it builds a connection across
teams. I know the things I'm doing are helping Google as a whole.

People are always going to have different feelings, and often mixed feelings,
about putting time into a side project rather than concentrating on their main
thing or doing something away from the computer. For me it comes and goes:
some days I want a change and sometimes I feel too busy.

How many of you who have startups would feel OK about taking time from it to
spend Friday working on an open source project, even if you don't have a boss
that's stopping you?

------
zafka
While I am saddened by the fact that this is coming to an end, I understand
it. I have always wanted to work in a "Bell labs" type of environment. Now
that the little fish I was working at got bought by "big Corp" I have been
angling to get something like this started at our division. But.... while I
have the type of mind that does very well pulling in disparate ideas and
melding them together, I have found that a lot of the other engineers, even
the very smart ones, are not always good at invention. I can imagine that
Google, has possibly found a way to identify the best group to allow the extra
free time, rather than allowing it to everyone. Ideally, if they gave 75 to
100% freedom to the 1 to 5% that have the "gene" of true creativity, they will
be better off.

------
SkyMarshal
I've always wondered if one day a week was the optimum use of 20% time, given
the need for extended concentration and flow to do really good work in
software development.

Google has had some success with it obviously, but I wonder how it would have
worked had they done it by Quarter or semi-annually instead.

Say, you meet a certain threshold in your performance review, you get a lump
sum of ~20% of the time period that the review covers.

Say for a quarterly review, if you meet the threshold, you get 2.6 weeks. Or
semi-annually you get 5.2 weeks, straight. You have to be at the office, but
you can work on your own project during that time.

5.2 weeks is some serious hacking time, enabling a great deal of extended
focus. Highly productive Google engineers could probably bootstrap a startup
MVP in that time, except of course Google would own it.

~~~
nostrademons
You don't have to do it as one day a week.

Personally, the way I've always taken it was "I've got no pressing tasks I
need to take care of for my main project or for coworkers? Great, I'll work on
my 20% project!" And I've found out that over my nearly 5-year career at
Google, this averages out to pretty close to 20%. But there were weeks that I
did _nothing_ but 20% work, and there were stretches of 2-3 months where I
didn't do 20% work at all.

We're evaluated over a long period of time and nobody really knows what you do
day-to-day, so it doesn't actually matter all that much _how_ you take 20%
time, the important thing is what comes out of it.

------
krob
This always happens when large companies assert more control in the form of
analytic analysis on the productivity of virtually everything. When you are
building a pipeline which must be efficient, analytic analysis / statistical
analysis plays a huge role in improving efficiency, but it's also a stifling
factor when it pertains to the creativity of new solutions.

Google previously focused more on the creativity of new better solutions to an
array of different verticals. Now they are focusing on the creativity of their
own "super-man-team" instead of the "our peoples make crazy stuff, we hire
amazing people" and let them go at it in their spare time and build innovative
projects.

Maybe this time marks a period in Google's future where they stop innovating
in a disruptive fashion.

------
cpcarey
20% time helps bring in the "entrepreneurial" types of engineers that Google
seeks to hire and as it starts to disappear, they might see fewer of those
hires and more of those engineers leaving. Perhaps it's simply because Google
has grown to the size where it can take on really big innovative projects
(Google X) instead of the respectively smaller projects that were created
under 20% time. They've found that they can't have both without hurting their
bottom line, so they've decided to go after the big projects. It's a
significant shift, but in the end, it could be good for all of us because many
have the resources to go after the small and medium wins, but only a few can
go after the really big wins.

------
freyr
After getting a PhD in (non-CS) engineering and a boring office job, I became
somewhat enamored with the idea of Google's 20% time allowance and its
apparent spirit of innovation. It led me recently to begin investing my free
time in learning the foundations of CS properly. While this effort could lead
me down different paths, in the back of my mind, I always thought it would be
really cool to land a job at Google. That possibility, whatever its
likelihood, has motivated me.

So in some sense, this comes as depressing news.

But not really, because another company will take its place, and I can set my
sights there.

------
calinet6
/play trombone

Whelp, it's been grand, Google. Who's next?

Someday a company might actually grow correctly and preserve their humanity
and agility despite our tendency for social discord as a species, but it's a
damn hard problem.

------
graycat
There are a lot of good remarks in this thread.

I will try to add a point I haven't seen here yet:

Once I was in a big company with a big, famous research lab.

The group I was in, just three of us, was led by a guy who had taken some
technical work and published some papers. The journals were peer-reviewed but
semi-popular so reached some ordinary business customers. The papers fit in
with a lot of hype at the time.

So, some of the customers picked up a phone and called our group for more
information. So, presto, we got contact with real customers otherwise
essentially forbidden in research.

Why forbidden? Because the sales/marketing guys wanted to be the guys who had
total control over all contact with customers.

Eventually our little group broke up, and I wanted to do some research that
would lead to products to be sold to customers. I started to discover that no
one in the company wanted that. The big guys in research wanted to throttle
all contacts outside research and mostly didn't want any. The people in sales,
marketing, product development, and product production didn't want to deal
with anything new from research. No one wanted a research worker bee talking
to real customers.

Next, when research did come up with something that might be of interest to
real customers, no one wanted to pursue that opportunity. Again, the marketing
people wanted to be the source of all new product/service initiatives. No one
in research wanted a research worker bee to get credit/blame having a product
go from research to success/failure in the market.

In the end, research was forced to be essentially irrelevant to the business.
Finally research was turned into a patent shop so that lawyers could take the
big patent portfolio, go to companies, claim patent infringement, and
'license' the patent portfolio.

Point: Generally, a business organization, given a nice new product/service to
offer their customers, has multiple layers of organizations and people,
processes, reasons, etc. why they just do not, _not_ want to come out with
anything new. Period.

Curiously, yes, some of the people at some of the customer organizations were
eager to work with our group in research as a way to look more _innovative_
within their own organizations. Here, of course, they didn't have to work
through layers of _managers_ but only had to exercise their own freedom to
handle their own responsibilities.

So, lesson: Commonly individuals are ready to do and offer new things to
others or try new things from others, but it's the layers of managers who
block such things.

So, the blockage of these layers of managers is one of the main reasons and
opportunities for entrepreneurship.

Yes, it's dumber than paint, but it's usually the way of the world.

~~~
ishansharma
This whole segmentation is really bad. And from outside, it does seem quite
simple.

This brings me to my staple question again: "How in the world those
intelligent people with all those qualifications fail to understand something,
well, dumber than paint?"

Or is it that majority of layers are full of unwilling/stupid people. I can
see people being unwilling. During my time in internship, I became quite
hesitant to touch any issue that wasn't assigned to me. QA guy didn't know
much about programming and assigned features randomly. And there was no
incentive for me to develop a feature assigned to someone else(though being
curious, I did "snatch" a feature or two and implemented myself)!

I guess one weak point causes the problems and then they get amplified! That's
how offices work.

~~~
graycat
> This brings me to my staple question again: "How in the world those
> intelligent people with all those qualifications fail to understand
> something, well, dumber than paint?"

Dumber than paint, but usually not totally irrational for the managers who do
such things.

Generally if such dumb behavior is made sufficiently 'public', then nearly
everyone will fall in line and agree that, yes, sure, it was dumb and we don't
want anything like that going on here.

Otherwise, dumber than paint is common, and here is some of why: You are a
manager, at some level, but not CEO, with several subordinates, managers
and/or worker bees. One of your subordinates comes to you with a new 'idea' X.
Maybe all X is is 'blue sky', back of the envelope, 10 pages of manuscript
descriptions and/or mathematical derivations, a carefully prepared paper of 50
pages with technology, market analysis, cost and revenue projections, running
prototype software, breadboard hardware, joint research with some leading
customers, or some such.

Your mission, and likely you have to accept it, now, is to decide what to do
about project X.

Suppose you investigate project X. Okay, that's time and energy away from your
assigned duties that count with your manager. So, maybe you put in some
weekends investigating project X -- now your spouse is unhappy.

Suppose from your investigation you decide to try to support project X. In
simple terms, there are two cases:

Success. Suppose project X is a success in some significant sense, say, the
project grows in headcount, budget, floor space, etc. Suppose project X gets
some publicity in the company and/or outside. Suppose some major customers
hear about project X and tell your marketing people and/or CEO that they want
to try X. Etc. Now you can be seen as a bright, rising star, and your
management chain from your manager all the way up to but possibly not
including the CEO and COB feels threatened by you and will, all together, at
the first opportunity, hang you by your toes from a lamppost in the employee
parking lot.

Failure. Suppose project X is a failure. Then all the resources you devoted to
it will be considered a waste for the company. You will be painted as an
incompetent, loose cannon on the deck, and chastised, ostracized, put on the
slow track, have a black mark on your career, or just moved out the door.

Commonly there is only one person in the company who can push project X, put
up with the blame if X fails, and really benefit from the credit if X
succeeds, and that one person is the CEO.

If the CEO sees that you got dumped on for your efforts with project X, then
he may shake a finger at the managers in your management chain, but likely you
still don't report to the CEO who still needs your management chain for the
responsibilities they have been assigned to do.

On the other hand, suppose you decide just to get a list of excuses, that you
release only one at a time as needed, for just why project X is 'not
appropriate' for your group. That is, you pour cold water on project X and
work to kill it. Here you are likely safe from any blame or attacks and don't
have to lose some weekends on project X.

So, net, nearly never does anyone get blamed for not innovating.

Really, usually in an organization, there is work to be done, and the
management tree is a partition of that work to get it done. No one is holding
their breath waiting for innovation to save or even help the company.

The company and its existing products/services, customers, revenue, earnings,
stockholders, etc. is a valuable bird in the hand, and any innovation is seen
as at best two birds in the bush.

So, possibly one reason for the old 20% time of Google was to let everyone in
the organization pursue their case of a project X without blame and, also, to
get a hearing, without much risk, in case their project X looks good.

Why stop 20% time? Maybe not much good was coming from the 20% time. Maybe a
lot of middle and upper managers got tired of having to evaluate projects they
really were not interested in -- a VC can get 2000 contacts from entrepreneurs
in a year and invest in 0-3 -- so, that's about 2000 contacts a year tossed in
the trash, and maybe Google managers didn't want to evaluate such projects.
Maybe the Google top management was concerned that the main work was not
getting done fast or well enough. Maybe the 20% time looked like chaos.
Whatever.

As we know, Jobs or Woz was at HP, presented to a manager at HP the idea for,
say the Apple I, and secretly smiled when the manager said that HP would not
be interested.

It remains that some of the most important ideas in computing are
authentication, capabilities, and access control lists. These were in good
form in the MIT Project MAC computer Multics. Also processor architecture with
gate segments, since in Intel's x86 architecture.

Well, Multics was done on a computer from GE, expensive. GE sold their
computer division to Honeywell, so Multics was on a Honeywell. Honeywell
didn't like selling Multics, and not many were sold -- one sale was in
basement of a five sided building on the west bank of the Potomac River. Some
engineers at Honeywell saw 'bit sliced' hardware and microcode and concluded
that with those two, some extra register sets, a tweaked Fortran compiler, and
the Multics hard/software ideas, they could bring up Multics on a single board
super-mini computer, sell it, and make money. The story went that the
Honeywell managers said that they didn't believe that there could be such a
computer, that if there was it wouldn't sell, and even if it did Honeywell
would not be interested. So, the engineers started Prime computer, one of the
three, along with DEC VAX and DG 'Soul of a New Machine' MV8000, on or near
Route 128 in Boston. As I recall, in 1980, Prime yielded the best ROI of any
stock on the NYSE. Later Prime got a CEO from a big computer company and went
down, down, splash!

It's a very old lesson: Big companies do not, _not_ want to innovate. An
explanation doesn't really need the book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' and is
simpler -- people acting dumber than paint and, the real cause, getting away
with, and even benefiting from, it.

Why? Because nearly no one can be sure that a project X would work. So early
on, dropping project X into the bit bucket is not proven to be a disaster. The
short term cost is easier to see than the long term gain. Why? Because
accurately evaluating a project X is commonly a lot of work and still needs
some judgment and with results that really cannot easily be communicated to
others, say, higher mangers, the CEO, the Board, security analysts, the tech
trade press, or the stockholders. So, dumber than paint is accepted as okay.

Then one of the big opportunities, especially now with the fantastic
price/performance of computer hardware, Internet bandwidth, and infrastructure
software, is information technology entrepreneurship. Broadly in economic
terms we want to automate everything in sight to give higher economic
productivity. There should be lots of opportunities, better than wheels,
bronze, iron, open ocean sailing, steel, steam, electric power, motors, and
lights, internal combustion engines, oil, radio, TV, chemical engineering,
"plastics!", etc.

But a bootstrapped entrepreneur can't do a 13 nm microelectronics fabrication
facility, an iPhone 10, a Tesla, etc. So, a company with everything in place
-- HR, legal, finance, floor space, and cash -- should have a big, huge
advantage in innovation, i.e.. powerful, valuable new products that will make
a bundle but that small entrepreneurs can't do. So, maybe it's the first HP
scientific pocket calculator, the first HP laser/ink jet printer. The Apple
iPad, iPhone, etc.

Still, apparently to be good at such 'internal innovation' takes a Jobs. For a
Steve Ballmer, John Chambers, Marissa Mayer, Larry Ellison, Page/Brin, maybe
the best they can do is to buy a HotMail, YouTube, Tumblr, and just hope not
to kill it right away.

Back to my startup!

------
spiritplumber
That's sad.

I remember being in direct competition on a project with a google 20% team,
and only beating them by a few weeks. We had fun with that.

I guess that's just the natural life cycle of companies?

------
sebnukem2
And that signals the beginning of the end for Google, when an engineer-lead
company is taken over by "managers". It happened and will happen to all
companies.

------
elliottcarlson
My previous employer had a 10% time in place - which while in theory was a
great idea, I found myself always too busy to take advantage of the time. This
is in no fault to my employer, or my direct management - but lets face it - at
a startup, there is little room to not be working. When you already are coding
long hours, trying to make quick changes, implementing new features constantly
- there just isn't enough time to do it.

~~~
potatolicious
I disagree. I currently work at a startup with 10% time, and barring rare "the
servers are on fire!" events, we're pretty religious about doing it. Even when
we skip it, it's credited so we can take it later (arguably better since you
get longer stretches of it).

Like most startups, we also operate at breakneck pace, we're not exactly
sitting around twiddling our thumbs. This strikes me as the same as "I don't
have time to..." excuses people make in their personal lives. If you value it
enough, you will find a place for it.

It's all about how much you _actually_ value the 10%-time, or if it's just a
recruiting/PR gimmick. If the company approaches it from a "it would be _nice_
if..." angle, it will always find a million things that are higher-priority
than 10%-time. If you approach it from the "this is a critical part of company
strategy" angle, you will find ways to keep it sacrosanct.

~~~
elliottcarlson
I was often encouraged to just take the 10% time - and perhaps it is an excuse
on my part, but at the same time I valued my work and took pride in
accomplishing certain tasks that I felt that that work was far more important.
In the end, I did spend some time on personal projects that ended up getting
implemented, but in the year and a half I was there, it was definitely not an
often used perk (on my part).

------
GoldfishCRM
This is great news. Even Google that where a startup started are starting with
big business bad manners. All of us know that starting a company is much much
easier then it was before and defently not like in the 1950 where you needed a
lot of money to get going. All of my worries that google will keep a dominated
position on the market is gone. So lets go out there and kill it.

------
noonespecial
Right along with "anecdotes are not data" should be "long-term success is not
made of little bits of short-term success".

------
morgante
So we can effectively say goodbye to a strong engineering culture at Google.
With layers and layers of PMs, the best and brightest have no desire to entire
their system. So Google's left with the academically talented individuals who
don't have much initiative or drive outside of extremely narrow scopes. (So,
innovation was killed by the bottom line.)

------
untilHellbanned
I think they are doing ok and will continue to do ok with "side-projects":
Google Fiber, Google Glass, Google Cars.

------
tomasien
Isn't their continued investment in things like Google X sort of the more
scalable replacement to 20% time, now that not all of the engineers are
brilliant and driven? Just kind of a natural result of scale - find the people
that were actually using 20% time and give them 100% time.

------
mck-
> And what’s more, if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other
> companies, which reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of
> others, wise to continue trying to copy it?

I thought it was Google that copied it from 3M, who invented the Scotch Tape
during the 20% time?

------
eliben
A completely wrong piece of HN-bait.

------
xadxad
Mimms, original author, posted a follow-up which incorporates a lot of the
comments from here. I've posted it to HN here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6225725)

------
smutticus
Public companies must focus 100% of their energy and attention on this
quarter's earnings. Anything less and the CEO could get fired. Actual
investment in long term strategies gets reduced to lip service.

------
rel
Just because people aren't "approving" the project doesn't mean it's not going
to happen. Chrome started as a 20% project and it wasn't approved until it was
way into development.

------
grandalf
There are a few other signs that Google is freaking out about wasting money.

\- search in Gmail is actually losing functionality.

\- hemming and hawing about the NSA scandal (not wanting to risk irritating
political leaders)

\- ending free google apps tier

\- ending google reader

\- ending 20% time

------
_pmf_
> It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons

What a huge sacrifice HP made thereby. Friday afternoon is otherwise the most
productive time of the week.

------
snorkel
No companies should be offering 20% time anyway because it's a difficult
promise to keep between crunch schedules and need to keep work between teams
synchronized. Some companies also have creative interpretations of "20% time"
as "We offer 20% time: you can spend 20% of your time doing whatever marketing
needs you to do" turning the whole notion of 20% time into a disincentive.

Hack Days work much better. Easier to accommodate and more fun.

~~~
bmj
Crunch schedules are often the result of poor management (at many points along
the chain). My group seems to handle the balance reasonably well--we certainly
go through crunch times (either because of deadlines, or customer requests),
but when we are outside those times, we can spend some of our time playing
with things. There's no guarantee that we get some percentage of our time each
week or month to play with new things, but if we feel we can put it into our
schedules, we have the freedom to do it.

------
nerfhammer
Killing Reader -- something no engineer would ever do -- was already proof
that the engineers are no longer in charge

~~~
sgustard
Would they approve a 20% project that aims to bring back Reader? Or would you
be able to work on that without approval? Just seems like a lot of politics
would be tied up in what people choose to work on.

------
cpeterso
When did Google first introduce 20% Time? I'm curious how it became an
official activity.

------
Fuxy
And this is why business will never truly innovate and government backed
projects that waste tonnes of money will bring the truly revolutionary
discoveries.

It is probably not intentional but their inability to manage funding is
actually a blessing in disguise for most labs.

Business is just not capable of long term dedication to experimentation
planing an innovation.

------
mcmillion
Good. Now they just need to spend that extra time fixing bugs in most of their
software.

------
hiby007
Yes because for innovation they have a separate unit namely GOOGLE VENTURES.

~~~
perishabledave
Sure, but 20% helps with innovation within Google, give googlers room for to
flex their creative muscles, and is attractive to potential hires.

------
mattstocum
And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?

~~~
anjc
They probably didn't lose as much money as they're gaining from the successful
ones

~~~
nfoz
It's not as if Google never would have thought to make a web-based mail if
someone didn't do it in their 20% time...

~~~
toyg
At the time, Google was a search engine, period.

Expecting Google to build a webmail system would have been like expecting
Twitter to release an accounting package.

------
cLeEOGPw
"Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly
measures all employees’ productivity—and the level of productivity that teams
are expected to deliver assumes that employees are working on their primary
responsibilities 100% of the time."

I know that it is a large company and control is required to manage
everything, but this sounds depressing. I'm glad I work in a tiny company and
even smaller team.

~~~
plywoodtrees
This description may lead you to imagine software counting how many lines
someone changes or how many hours of the day someone is typing. That would be
pretty depressing, but I don't think Google does that.

Their performance measurements are much more based off asking other engineers
and colleagues what they think of your work.

