
Ask HN: Does Google “20% time” still exist? - LeonB
Does google still have a policy of allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on unofficial&#x2F;passion projects?<p>Searching the internet gives very conflicting answers on this. Does anyone have the facts?
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dman
Yes. Google is a competitive place, so opting for 20% time can slow down your
career progression unless you are extraordinarily good since it might reduce
your ability to create impact at your "real" job. But as long as you
understand that, you can do it. (I know people who have done 20% projects in
the last year)

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malux85
Offering 20% time and then engineering a company with an internal culture that
makes it so that you can’t take the 20% time is functionally equivalent of not
having the time.

I know your response is going to be “well, it’s available and is the employees
choice” which is exactly the type of culture engineering I’m talking about

The most creative people are high in trait openness, and are conflict
avoiders. The situation you describe is likely to result in only the more
disagreeable people taking the 20% with the creative opens not taking it to
avoid conflict - so there we are, google engineered an internal culture where
their 20% time is not taken by those who it would be most beneficial for
google to do so.

This is partially why I left google after 3 years of working there, because I
could see that it was just about myopic immediate goals and creativity and
curiosity are no longer valued

This is largely why we haven’t seen much innovation out of google in the last
4-5 years, because it’s become a max($) optimiser.

Google don’t want open, creative ideas, they want a bunch of naïve young
programmers who they can Overwork because “working at Google is cool”, but
Google’s problem is that the smart young are now wising up to this, and their
image is shaking. This will result in all of the B level programmers flooding
into Google (when I started there it was all A’s, then the Bs started
permeating 2 years later) now the place is filling up with walking calculators
- brilliant at arithmetic but no lateral thinking.

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cblum
> now the place is filling up with walking calculators - brilliant at
> arithmetic but no lateral thinking.

That was exactly the impression my interviewers left on me when I interviewed
there a couple years ago.

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jeffjose
I take it you are a SWE. There's plenty of non-SWE folks at Google FWIW.

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boulos
It varies. Most people I know joke that it's now "120% time". That is, nobody
is going to stop you doing something interesting alongside your expected work.

However, I would argue that the expectations are low enough, that it's easy
enough to carve out some time without material impact on your main effort.
More challenging is getting a bunch of folks together, if you've got an idea
that needs more firepower than just your own effort.

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cstrasen
We are having a 20% time at my company (Medigo) since almost 5 years. Though
the effects are hard to prove I see these:

    
    
      - obviously great for hiring
      - as we are not in a position to offer super advanced technical projects to tinker around with, it may have helped retention in a few cases, maybe general
      - one side project made it into a successful in-house product
      - it is sometimes a useful gap-filler if a project/backlog is not ready enough to start or too crowded on the dev side (a rare problem, ha!)
    

The biggest advantage though I feel is that it frees from hierarchy, planning
and (most) coordination needs. Agile or not, the overheads are real.
Developers often "know" at the back of their head what is the right thing to
do. Let them do it. 20% is great for learning responsible autonomy.

Slightly OT but I wonder what the readers of this thread have experienced with
this model and how acceptance in the wider company was handled.

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segmondy
No

