Ask HN: Does Google still do 20% time? - RyanShook
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c0110
Don't know if you can say Google as a whole does 20% time. But there are many
Googlers who do 20% time. I've done several 20% projects in the last 2 years.

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RyanShook
I’ve heard some people say that 20% time is still in effect and others say
that the company has moved away from it.

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jfoster
The fact that there isn't a clear, certain answer suggests that it's at least
not what it used to be.

I think the more interesting question is, what changed? Is it simply too much
time to put at risk as they scaled? Did they determine that 5 days of focus on
just one thing works a lot better?

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nostrademons
When I was there ('09-14), the senior executives would say "20% time means
something different to every person you ask".

From Larry's POV, 20% time was supposed to be an escape valve to find the next
billion-dollar business. He knew that good ideas often look like bad ideas and
that there was a good chance the next great idea wouldn't come from him (after
all, crucial elements of Google's success like the ad auction system didn't
come from him), so he built in a mechanism where smart engineers could go
around his back and work on a prototype without him knowing, and then only
take it to him once there was a demo worth looking at. This unfortunately
didn't really scale as the company grew bigger, because with more employees,
the chance that someone _other_ than Larry would shoot down your idea before
it got to him got high enough that basically no good ideas were getting
through. (The last 20% project I'm aware of that became a true product area
was Google Now, started in 2007 and graduated to a full-fledged product around
2011.)

Craig Silverstein viewed 20% time as a way to build social ties _across_
product areas and avoid siloing and trust barriers. The idea is that if you
spent 20% of your time working with a team that had nothing to do with your
main project, this created a parallel network, separate from the reporting
hierarchy, that allowed information to flow across different departments. This
usage of 20% time was still alive and well when I left, even though Craig
Silverstein had left a couple years earlier.

Many managers and employees viewed 20% time as a way to "try out" a new team:
if you were thinking of transferring, you could do a 20% project for the new
team and they'd vouch for the transfer. This mechanism was also still alive
and well, for those employees savvy enough to take advantage of it, when I
left.

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shostack
I've heard from some that 20% time has since become 120% time (at least in
some non-engineering orgs). Thoughts?

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nostrademons
True but not a recent phenomena. If you hear stories from Google's early days
when 20% time was a buzzword (around 03-05), people always worked well more
than 8 hours.

It takes a fairly massive amount of time to build something from scratch, and
if you chose what you're working on, you'll _want_ to spend that time.
Managers _are_ expected to adjust expectations and not require more than 4
days of work if a person has a 20% project, but given that it's software and
software never seems to hew to planned deadlines, this tends to stretch.

Actually, I suspect that a lot of the decline in 20% time is because Google
hires more people now who want a stable 9-5, who have no particular ambition
to try out a new idea on their own or build something from scratch.

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slurppurple
I asked some developers when I was on a tour there and they said yes and no,
and that sometimes their 20% work became they're full time work. Not sure what
that means exactly.

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sova
Gmail

