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The Decline of '20% Time' at Google
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 ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."
The stock market kills companies.
A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What that often translates into is: do stuff we aren't paying you for. Why can't the staff handle their own secretarial needs? Why can't they clean up their own workspace, get their own supplies from storage, install their own software etc etc. We take what was before someone elses full time job and just tack it on to everyone else's day but don't reduce the productivity expectations to compensate.
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
It is absolutely amazing how half the people on this forum have managed to convince themselves that every single thing that is wrong with the tech industry is also, somehow, Steve Jobs' fault.
Motorola in 1981 they used to say "work smarter, not harder", we got comp time off for overtime worked, etc. After a while it became "work harder", and the comp time off went away, and overtime was expected with no compensation. A little while later it became "work!", followed by "work, goddamit!" where you were viewed unfavorably if you used company time to take a leak.
The bean counters always win...
I'm sorry but Apple deserves what they get as Jobs knew for a decade his time was running out but right up almost to the bitter end he refused to groom his replacement and make sure the company would continue down the path he set. You read the emails and other behind the scenes stuff and its really hard to get the impression all that Jobs cared about was Jobs and that the company tanking when he died would just boost his legend that much more which was fine by him.
As for Google they need to remember who was ruling the roost when they started, Altavista and Yahoo...where are they now? Altavista is gone and Yahoo is a shell of its former self. Google NEEDS all those bright young people cooking up new products on their dime as that is what lets them stay ahead of the game and in tech if you sit on ass and just ride on existing products it really don't take long for the hot new thing to come out and steal your thunder. Remember folks once upon a time Yahoo and MSFT were kings and Apple had Michael Dell telling them to give the money to the shareholders and give up as they had NO chance to recover, in tech you innovate or you sit on ass and if you ain't doing one you are probably doing the other.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But there is something else going on here.
Google was, a long time ago, a young idealistic company full of people that had drunk the Kool-Aid and were willing to pour out their energy into neat little side projects that one day might make Google greater.
Times have changed.
The smart folks at Google percolate their ideas on their own time in secret, and then bail out and start a "start-up" (and then possible sell the idea back to Google).
The whole "creativity" dynamic has changed at Google. It is still a pool of VERY smart people, but they know better than to give their ideas away for free.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
MBAs are extremely important in few numbers. But once you have entire departments full of them, they become parasitic by short-changing the company in order to make themselves and their position have a sense of value.
Maybe someone with an MBA can show us an MBA ratio bell curve graph with regard to company productivity. =)
Life is not for the lazy.