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

[alen]

so why did google go public if its so bad?
why couldn't there be a geek charity fund to raise $5 billion or so to give out to the original employees to cash out their hard work?

Re:Object lesson

[Opportunist]

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.

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.

Re:Object lesson

[EvanED]

There are laws and rules that require publicly traded companies to maximize stockholder profit.

No no no no!

It's not really true. It's not completely false to talk about the need of public companies to take into consideration , but there are significant problems with the argument most of the time you see someone trot out that line. Shareholder wealth maximization is a consideration, but is by far need not be be-all, end-all goal from a legal perspective. This is particularly true in this scenario of 20% time, because if the board thought that 20% time was a good thing to have from the company's perspective, they would be completely allowed to implement it.

"While the duty to maximize shareholder value may be a useful shorthand for a corporate manager to think about how to act on a day to day basis, this is not legally required or enforceable. The only constraint on board decision making is a pair of duties â" the âoeduty of careâ and the âoeduty of loyalty.â The duty of care requires boards to be well informed and to make deliberate decisions after careful consideration of the issues. Importantly, board members are entitled to rely on experts and corporate officers for their information, can easily comply with duty of care obligations by spending shareholder money on lawyers and process, and, in any event, are routinely indemnified against damages for any breaches of this duty. The duty of loyalty self evidently requires board members to put the interests of the corporation ahead of their own personal interest."

"But if shareholder value thinking is counterproductive, how did it become so prevalent? Non-experts often assume the approach is rooted in law, and that public companies are legally required to maximize profits and shareholder returns. This is pure myth. Thanks to a legal doctrine called the business judgment rule, corporate directors who refrain from using corporate funds to line their own pockets remain legally free to pursue almost any other objective, including providing secure jobs to employees, quality products for consumers and research and tax revenues to benefit society."

"[Dodge vs. Ford Motor Company] is frequently cited as support for the idea that "corporate law requires boards of directors to maximize shareholder wealth." The following articles attempt to refute that interpretation. ... In that context, the Dodge decision is viewed as a mixed result for both sides of the dispute. Ford was denied the ability to arbitrarily undermine the profitability of the firm, and thereby eliminate future dividends. Under the upheld business judgment rule, however, Ford was given considerable leeway via control of his board about what investments he could make. That left him with considerable influence over dividends, but not as complete control as he wished."

"Many of us have heard that corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder value. Guess what, they are not. The law in the United States does not require management to maximize shareholder value (except under rare circumstances such as when the company gets put up for sale). This may surprise you because you've also probably also heard that shareholders own the corporation. That's not true either."

And finally, to make things ever more interesting:

"In case law speak, judicial commentary articulating an opinion and not decisive to the case is known as "dicta" and is not binding in the court of law. The comments that have made Dodge v. Ford the si

Re:Object lesson

[Jane Q. Public]

There are two things wrong with what the article states. The first, is that it goes on and on about how Google just doesn't do it anymore. Which is a clear example of circular reasoning: "We don't need it anymore because we aren't doing it anymore."

The second thing is the last part of OP's post:

"More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."

This is a nonsensical statement. You don't "make an idea great". It either is or isn't. You can make a plan or a business great, but ideas, by definition, stand on their own, or not.

In fact Google is rather infamous for taking lots of pretty good ideas and driving them into the ground... perhaps for precisely the reason that they were trying to follow some misguided notion of "making the ideas better".

All in all, it sounds rather like an apologia for a company that has grown more like a cancer than a weed, and is now more of an evil Frankenstein's monster than it is a Jolly Green Giant.

Re:Object lesson

[siride]

I think the phrase "make a good idea great" means to implement it effectively and come up with closely related good ideas so that the net result of the original good idea is beyond what a baseline, minimal implementation would effect.

Re:Object lesson

[davester666]

It's just how the whole stock market/analyst reports/etc are reported/portrayed in North America.

Meet the numbers that a bunch of random guys have made up as to how much you "should" have sold this quarter, or your stock price drops because a bunch of hedge funds have decided that the random guys know more about running your business than you do.

Re:Object lesson

[mattmarlowe]

Your refutal of the maxime shareholder profit argument may be technically correct, but it's probably simplistic....whenever an officer of a company makes a decision that can be questioned as not maximizing profit, he is opening himself up to the possibility of a shareholder lawsuit. If the officer is the CEO, the risks are even greater.

So guess what happens...the ceo is advised by his lawyer how to behave, the ceo advises his subordinate managers how to behave, and the a new culture trickles down...

No one is to blame but the system here.

Re:Object lesson

[DerekLyons]

so why did google go public if its so bad?

Because they handed out stock options left and right, and ended up with enough people holding enough vested options that the rules said they had to go public. But even, they pulled a fast one - the GOOG traded on the market are lower class shares... with no dividend, ownership, or voting rights. All of higher class shares with all those rights are held by a very small number of people - early Google insiders, investors, and VC's.

Re:Object lesson

[lightknight]

For the same reason that keeping a pet dragon sounds like an awesome idea while it's young and small, and not so awesome when it's older, way bigger than you and someone forgot to feed it while you were on vacation (gotta feed them properly, or they get aggressive).

In other words, Google thought it was a great idea, like most young companies...and at first, it was. Then, before it noticed anything, it woke up one day with the NSA sharing its data-center, its geek utopia turned into corporate dystopia, and all sorts of unhappiness infiltrating it from all levels. The 20% time for personal projects, or rather, lack thereof, means that Google won't be coming out with anything ground-breaking for a while....because the most outstanding inventions are the ones that inventors are never looking for (Archimedes and the bath tub)...in other words, the mental fields need to lay fallow for a bit for a better yield...and the fact that Google's techs are spending all their time just holding onto what they have means they have both a management problem (communications is not only gummed up, but completely red-taped, in all probability...too much dead-wood) and a personnel problem (they need to hire more people; more programmers, but also more people in other areas, in all probability...but none of that matters if management isn't fixed first).

Re:Object lesson

[schnell]

At best most shareholders care only about where the stock is next quarter.

I hear this a lot on Slashdot but it's just not true (depending on how you define "most"). The majority of publicly traded shares out there are in the hands of large mutual funds and banks. These are absolutely long-term investors - they want as little volatility as possible and they have a strong interest in picking companies that match their investment profile ("growth companies," "low risk companies with dividends," whatever) and sticking with them.

Day trading individuals and HFT arbitrageurs etc. only care about day to day or hour to hour. They may command a lot of attention, but they really aren't a big part of the market unless you're talking about penny stocks, pink sheets or other exchanges that the "big boys" of investment don't want to touch.

Re:Object lesson

[houghi]

If you could have Bill Gates' money or solve world hunger, what color would your Ferrari be?

Re:Object lesson

[russotto]

But people buy stock on the premise that dividends can be handed out. Take away the premise and the stock is almost worthless.

From Google's initial prospectus:

We do not intend to pay dividends on our common stock.

We have never declared or paid any cash dividend on our capital stock. We currently intend to retain any future earnings and do not expect to pay any dividends in the foreseeable future.

From Google's investor FAQ:

Does Google pay a cash dividend?

No, we have never declared or paid a cash dividend nor do we expect to pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

So, if you buy GOOG expecting a dividend, you simply haven't done your homework.

Do more for less

[Billly Gates]

Isn't that what the MBAs and metric gurus teach?

Once again the Excel numbers make the day and if there is a hidden cost or an opportunity cost then it doesn't exist according to the CPA

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.

Re:Do more for less

[Billly Gates]

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!

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?

[Bob9113]

...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.

Same thing I came in here to say. Ars' argument seems about as on-target as saying, "Warrantless NSA surveillance of all Americans' Internet activity isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the NSA wants to know what you read."

Re:bad thing for who?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Then there is the possibility of the "pieces of flair" (from Office Space) dilemma. As in your manager saying "I see you put the minimum number of hours of work here at Google. See Tommy over there? He puts in an extra 15% of work time on special projects. I can't tell you to work for free, but look how enthusiastic Tommy is about his job".

You become torn between working for free on something that could make Google money or going home at a decent hour. Your decision could cause you to suffer financially by being passed over for promotions by people who did innovative work for free.

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.

Eliminating 20% time not the answer

[mysidia]

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.

Re:Eliminating 20% time not the answer

[mysidia]

Chrome and gmail never would have become a reality with that mindset.

Why not? A minimum of 1% of any profit that would not exist without Gmail every year should be reserved for the folks who did meaningful work on it using their 20% time; even if they are no longer Google staff.

That sort of incentive structure would make efforts by employees to develop products like Chrome and Gmail a practical certainty.

Re:innovator's dilemma in action

[Billly Gates]

Now that they got a product they want to stop looking for new ones. When people move on from android to something else, when browser vendors have a way to search the web without relying on Google and friends etc Google will have no replacement products.

R&D isn't something that is ever done. You can't just say: we have a product now so lets cut the expense of the engineering department. Your competitors are always looking to leapfrog you or make your entire business obsolete. That is why you hire smart people and pay them to keep thinking.

More like the MBAs dilemma here.

The problem is traditionally the upper management guys were all engineers and scientists as the MBA program was to teach business skills to non business majors so they could lead companies.

Today, these institutions are led by cost accountants and Wall Street Financial gurus. The emphasis now is on quarterly profits and crazy ways to get there like firing all the good employees and replacing them with Chinese and cheaper Indian counterparts. Selling your assets which make you money (like AMD) etc and kissing up with Icahn and others and busting unions to reach these numbers.

All the while ignoring the opportunity costs such as good employees who have the power to gain another job will simply leave when it turns into this or when your competitors like Intel can make faster chips because they can use .22 nm dies and you are screwed with .38nm because you sold your assets for you bonus remember?

We see it with health insurance too. The doctors need to call the CPAs at the insurance companies for treatment. The CPAs also were the ones who blew up the Deep Water Horizon too and made engineering decisions so they can appease Wall Street and the CEO for his bonus.

Until this changes I do not know what the solution is other than to stay private or have several investors but not HFT computers and cost accountants make your critical business decisions. Google is heading down this route and will decline as emphasis is now on cost cutting and keeping what you have. My guess is within 5 to 10 years it will be an Indian company and will outsource cheaper employees or bring H1B1 visas in and devalue their talent to keep the share price going up. Meanwhile Bing will take over or a more agile competitor?

We will see

blame steve jobs

[alen]

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:blame steve jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Attack of the MBAs

[anvilmark]

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.

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. =)

I doubt the reports...

[dkegel]

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:I doubt the reports...

[hibiki_r]

Depends on management: You can easily swamp the most productive developers just fine by just assigning them more tasks than to everyone else. Whether you have extra time for side projects or not comes down to how much sandbagging you do. I've seen extremely good developers that, when facing a project they were uninterested in, would hand completely spurious estimates that make sure they don't work for more than 4 hours a week on their official project, and spend the rest of the time on other things. I've also seen expectations go up in such a way as to make sure no good code could come out of a team. On either case, the end result comes down to politics. Some people have enough political capital to ignore their project. Other times, entire teams leave in a matter of 6 months.

Skill as a developer is only really relevant to a developer's ability to do unofficial work in the sense that in some places, skill quickly translates into political capital.

Re:I doubt the reports...

[dkegel]

Are you talking about Google, or some other company? I don't remember anything like that going on at Google when I was there. The managers I observed were quite levelheaded and didn't assign too much work. The only real impatience I saw was when one product had too much latency visible to the end user. That resulted in a whole lot of impatience... and a new level of vigilence against latency creep. But that was a good thing.

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...

20% time is encouraged, but unpopular

[another_larson]

I work for Google. 20% time is unpopular, undertaken by single-digit percentages of engineers. Despite that, the message coming down from management is generally positive.

My sense of the issue is that a lot of engineers are spooking at shadows, worried about their performance reviews if they spend 80% of their time on their teams' main business rather than 100%. The solution to this, as far as I am concerned, is to make sure there is someone who is willing to stand up and say positive things about your project at review time. Since Google has an intricate system of peer review, that should be enough.

And if you can't find _one_ person who thinks your project is a good idea, take some time to figure out what you are hoping to accomplish before continuing.

Re:20% time is encouraged, but unpopular

[swillden]

I also work for Google, and the parent reflects what I see as well.

Relatively few engineers have a 20% project, but it's really their choice. Management is supportive of 20% time. FWIW, of the engineers who sit near me, 40% have 20% projects (including me). On my team, 100% have 20% projects -- but there are only two of us.

When you don't sharpen the saw...

[agapeton]

...you ruin projects with a dull blade. Because you cannot learn on the job (nobody should be reading the manual for a gun while in the trenches), the best thing company can do is provide this 20% time so the company can grow qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

It all makes sense...

[pongo000]

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 was all over it.

Re:It all makes sense...

[Animats]

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.

So essentially google retroactively downgraded

[flayzernax]

So essentially google retroactively downgraded the status of a majority of its workforce to mere peons.

Welcome to corporate bureaucracy Engies. Not surprised. You can only have so many "chiefs" and "innovators" on the payroll. They probably overfilled positions or used the title to attract people who were overqualified to apply.

Or the economy is doing so bad that it artificially filled low level positions with people more qualified causing them to be hired at incorrect rates. Because believe it or not people do try to throw you a bone now and then.

Re:Object lesson from the stock market

[hairyfeet]

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.

Time Management

[Taco Cowboy]

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:Time Management

[ericlondaits]

What time management methodology are you using? I use the Pomodoro Technique, but am willing to try something new. As a freelancer I fight against not being efficient with my time every day, and pay the consequences myself. Whenever I visit corporate clients I'm appalled at how they waste precious man hours.

Sounds better when you don't do the math

[js_sebastian]

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/

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.

The real reason for the decline

[atomicxblue]

Google is moving more towards hiring temporary employees. As a contractor, I wasn't eligible for the 20% time.

Will be difficult to bring back...

[jellybear]

Even if Google doesn't "need" new ideas right now and execution is more important, once they get rid of 20% time and it disappears from the corporate culture, it will be VERY difficult to bring back. I worked at a place where they tried to promote 20%. It never gained traction because of management's inability to reallocate the 20% from pre-existing tasks. Some day when Google is in need of brilliant ideas, they will probably regret this move.

wrong guy

[globaljustin]

every single thing that is wrong with the tech industry is also, somehow, Bill Gates' fault.

FTFY

for real, Steve Jobs is overrated as an 'tech innovator' I'll grant you...I could go on all day about it...

but there's no evidence that Jobs' legacy is as bad as you say...IMHO it is the reverse...

Jobs' wasn't an engineer. He was a marketer. We make a serious mistake when we look at major decisions Steve Jobs made and treat them as some sort of pattern for emulation.

He was hard headed and understood, as many salesman do, that you have to make a personal connection with the user.

He pushed through ideas whether they made sense or not based on his wild-eyed notions 'innovation'. Because American business is so risk-averse and because the competition was so egregiously poorly designed, by the law of averages some of his 'innovations' paid off well.

One that kills me is how, by fiat, Jobs decreed that the iPod 'just work' when you plug it in...

For over a decade, I'd have friends/family ask me for help 'putting music on my iPod'...because due to Jobs' wild-eyed 'user centered design' decree, the iPod would, when connected, automatically open itunes and start downloading your entire .mp3 library to the ipod, no matter how much space the ipod had or how big your music folder was...

It would start seemingly at a random place and go alphabetically until it was full.

By default, the iPod preferences in iTunes did NOT allow for the user to add or delete files to their iPod.

Non-tech friends/family would assume this is just how it worked...maybe make playlists to add songs.

It was ridiculous.

There are other examples.

Jobs' weilded user-centered design principles like barbarian...by sheer lack of options from competitors it was, comparitively 'more usable'...

I agree with the article

[Anonymous Coward]

The reasons for the decline of 20% time are valid: Google has a huge number of products, it's not clear the the company is best served by spinning of many new ones when it can improve what it has.

On a personal level it might be rewarding, but I don't think it's a big factor in every employee's decision. I am about to start working at Google and I'm not sure if I will actually use my 20% time because the projects I will be working on for my main job are already extremely interesting and varied. Not having 20% time doesn't automatically imply that your job will be monotonous and boring.

Death by MBA

[gestalt_n_pepper]

The typical slow degenerative death of great companies in the USA is almost always caused by bean counters seeking "efficiency." To MBAs and accountants, if can't be seen as a number on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist. What's behind the numbers is just magic that can be safely ignored.

Until the rot is too far gone and the ship sinks, but the rats can always find another ship. Hi ho!

Odd

[Maudib]

From what I have seen and heard from Google engineers (and I know quite a few) its alive and well. Many spend in excess of 50% of their time on 20% time projects. They have some legit related complaints though.

(1) The OKR and promotions process is extremely time consuming.
(2) The peer review process is even worse. They often state that every 3 months, they lose 1-2 weeks dealing with reviews.
(3) Many teams are weighed down by far too many people that have never worked outside of Google, so they have no idea about real world issues or how the rest of the world needs to interact with them. Man projects get derailed or delayed by absurd unnecessary excursions led by very smart but naive 25yo kids that are somehow level 5 or 6.

The end result is not that 20% time projects are suffering, but that actual projects are suffering. Engineers get frustrated and then use 20% time projects to switch teams.

To be honest, many of the best people I know there cant wait to leave or already have.