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."

Comments

Object lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

The stock market kills companies.

Re:Object lesson

[bondsbw]

Shareholders want to turn as much profit as they can in as short a time frame as can be done.

Going public is a great way to slowly kill a good company. Many shareholders don't care where the company is in 10 years; they care about their dollar in one year. When the stocks start on a permanent trend downwards, those shareholders sell and move to the next company that has potential in the near term.

bad thing for who?

[Trepidity]

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.

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.

Re:bad thing for who?

[Tough Love]

Don't worry, Tommy will be passed over for promotion too, even after sucking ass for years. You get to have a life and clean lips, in return for exactly the same result as Tommy. That's how it works.

Re:Do more for less

[ILongForDarkness]

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.

Back when I started working as engineer for

[mark_reh]

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...

Here's The Deal

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Attack of the MBAs

[DigiShaman]

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. =)