The Decline of '20% Time' at Google 198
One of the things Google is known for is giving their employees so-called '20% time' — that is, the freedom to use a fifth of their working hours to pursue their own projects. Many of these projects have directly improved Google's existing products, and some have spawned new products entirely. An article at Quartz on Friday made that claim that 20% time was all but dead at Google, largely due to interference from upper management. Some Google engineers responded, and said that it has essentially turned into 120% time — they're still free to undertake their own projects, but they typically need their whole normal work week to meet productivity goals. "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." An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful. "Google wasn’t hurting for successful products when it started to tout its 20 percent time: off the backs of its pre-IPO services, it earned a market cap of over $23 billion. But if it was a company that wanted to grow and diversify beyond products that were either related to search or derivative of what already existed, it needed more ideas, better ideas, as quickly as possible. Hence, liberal use of 20 percent time made a lot of sense. Now, Google is not only an enormous company of nearly 45,000 employees with a market cap twelve times that of its first IPO ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."
Eliminating 20% time not the answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Encourage employees to use the 20% time to Innovate within the existing projects; for example, by finding ways to make them better or lower their costs.
The value of people doing more than their jobs doesn't go away --- they just need to be more focused, in exactly, what those 20% projects are.
It's also only fair that the benefit of their 20% projects get included in their productivity. If an employee uses their intellectual resources to do something particularly innovative, they should be given an opportunity to reduce their required working hours by 50% with a net increase in pay and benefits, or an opportunity to move from "20% time" to "40% time" working on their own projects.
That is: the value delivered via the employee's hard work should be shared with the employee fairly. When the employee delivers more value than the average employee; they should be given back more opportunity.
On the other hand: if their 20% time doesn't win over management with a benefit within a year, perhaps they should get 15% time instead, from then on, until they can do better.
blame steve jobs (Score:3, Interesting)
a few months before he died he had dinner with sergey to mentor him. he said you have too much crap that no one cares about and google needs to focus on what brings in the cash. that's when they started their purge of anything that doesn't make money
same with facebook steve. he had dinner with him as well to tell him what he thought was wrong with facebook
Re:Do more for less (Score:4, Interesting)
What is productivity? How do you define productivity?
My point is you can work for gmail and do your metrics to hit your spam filtering code. But, what if the next big idea is there that can generate more revenue. Would it then be wise to work on better spam filtering for your gmail users or would it make more sense to fund something that no one has done yet and that Microsoft or Apple will invent and then patent the shit out of instead?
That was my point. I have worked at companies where they are were sooo process oriented that we just put out fires and no one could ever call out sick or go on vacation or the whole operation would shutdown.
The good employees left and they had to bring in H1B1 because they were cheaper and would have no quram working 65 hours a week just to remain employed. Work 40 hours a week you were fired for being lazy. No improvements and no say were allowed outside of the directors as we had no time to do anything else. We just put out fires and worked 120% to keep our jobs. That might have worked for the previous CEO to gain his bonus but the company is losing over a 1 billion a year now!
Attack of the MBAs (Score:5, Interesting)
The more MBAs in your organization the less innovation you will have.
They don't think in terms of success through better (or more diverse) products, only in squeezing maximum efficiency from everything - Marx would applaud them.
I doubt the reports... (Score:3, Interesting)
The original report of "For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects." can be explained well like this: people who are below average productivity in their team can't spare the time to work on 20% projects.
I don't think this is a harsh thing; it's just a fact of life.
By the way, the Google version of stack ranking (if I recall correctly from my time there) is something like "If you're a manager, and there's a guy on the team who isn't being very productive, make sure he knows about the problem, so he can do something about it."
Also not a harsh thing.
Google doesn't want to become a Cisco, where all the good ideas come from buying up little companies. I suspect that people of above average productivity at Google still have plenty of freedom to try experiments 20% time.
What has changed a bit is that since the mantra of the company became "Features, not products", those 20% experiments are almost always going to involve adding features or other improvements to existing products, not wholly new products.
And that's ok, too. There is a whole lot of room to add features and make things better under the hood.
Re:Object lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
Because money is tempting. Imagine this, there is a LOT of money (use your own definition of LOT) being dangled in front of you with the promise to not take any direct influence in your decisions. Hey, as long as I hold 50%+1 of the company I call the shots, right?
It usually doesn't take long to realize that those 50-1% hold a LOT of power over you when they can afford losing them and you cannot.
It all makes sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
The other day a Google tech recruiter (not a headhunter) contacted me about an interview at Google. This after I turned down a second interview with them seven years ago. Yes, seven years ago. It got me to thinking: Is Google that desperate for qualified employees that they are having to dig that deep into their interview files to find talent? After doing some research, it seems as though they want to interview me for a "technical sales engineering" position or some such thing. Still, this article and the fact that Google is searching their archives for help seems to point to a dwindling supply of technical types in the market.
And since I'm a few years older than Vince Vaughan, I seriously doubt I'd quite fit in anymore. Say what you want about The Internship, but Google's imprimatur [wikipedia.org] was all over it.
Time Management (Score:3, Interesting)
After reading all the 3 FAs I see a pattern --- the overarching focus of "20%" has flushed out one crucial inefficiency, not that of the corporation (Google), but of the engineers, ie.,
Those who claim that "20% time enticement" has turned into "120% overtime nightmare" are the same ones having terrible time management skills
Those who do not know how to manage their time tend to blame "meeting productivity goals" on their inability to meet their goals while using their time effectively
I used to be very terrible on managing my own time - and ended up wasting too much time on unimportant/unnecessary/meaningless routines - looking back on what I had done, I realize that the change of mindset (plus the time management methodology that I'm practicing) has not only has prevented me from wasting time on meaningless routine, it enables me to invest my NEW FOUND FREE TIME to experiment on new things that I've always wanted to try
I bet not all Google Engineers are making the same complain - those who do practices time management still manage to hit their productivity goals within their preset time frame and use their 20% time exploring new ideas, just as it was intended to be
Re:It all makes sense... (Score:4, Interesting)
The other day a Google tech recruiter (not a headhunter) contacted me about an interview at Google. This after I turned down a second interview with them seven years ago.
Weird. I had almost an identical experience last week. A Google tech recruiter sent me messages via both email and LinkedIn. He'd been looking at my technical web sites. I'm not interested; it's been years since I had to work for someone else. But I called the guy. It really was a Google recruiter. I hadn't heard from Google in about five years. They must be going through their back files.