[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's work...
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Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working culture?
I know the policy doesn't really exist anymore, but I still like
the idea a lot in principle (for large and financially secure
startups, say 1k developers and up). Just wondering what Xooglers
and others think about it.
Author : swyx
Score : 181 points
Date : 2020-12-12 10:37 UTC (1 days ago)
| chamberecho wrote:
| I have no idea if it was good for their culture since I never
| worked there... but I reckon a lot of corporate software
| engineering jobs have the same luxury, informally. I work at a
| big US bank where you might not expect such freedom, but in
| reality there is great flexibility to do things outside of the
| normal day to day BAU, simply because it's not hard to deliver a
| sufficient amount of work in less time than you're expected to be
| in the office (or covid equivalent), and nobody keeps that close
| an eye on what you do anyway. Still, with all that freedom people
| don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk off...
| onion2k wrote:
| _Still, with all that freedom people don 't always use it for
| good, they may actually just bunk off..._
|
| I imagine no one at Google used their 20% time project to bunk
| off, simply because it was 20% of their working time, and not
| 20% of their contracted hours. If you're supposed to do 40
| hours a week but you actually spend 80 hours working on _work_
| and 20 hours on your 20% project then you aren 't bunking off.
| Privacy846 wrote:
| Why would one do twice the hours that one is paid for? That
| makes no sense. :)
| ng12 wrote:
| > Still, with all that freedom people don't always use it for
| good, they may actually just bunk off...
|
| This is the right call. If you ever actually move the needle on
| anything important your fun 20% project will assuredly be taken
| over by middle management and you will get pushed out. If you
| have free time at a bank either slack off or work on low-effort
| projects that look good on your performance reviews.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I've been promoted so that I could
| maintain leadership of a successful 20% project before. And I
| didn't go into it expecting it to get any visibility, it just
| happened.
|
| Not all workplaces are toxic. You generally have to take
| charge of your own career. But often the politics align such
| that it'd be strange to kick someone off their 20% project if
| it's successful.
| ng12 wrote:
| Agreed, it absolutely depends on where you work and
| sometimes your management chain. I'm mostly referring to
| the finance industry where I've seen this pattern repeated
| many times.
| agilob wrote:
| > don't always use it for good, they may actually just bunk
| off...
|
| Which is good if you're tired, overworked, didn't sleep well or
| just want to spend some time with family. I usually use it to
| read books not closely related to my daily work, but related to
| what my coworkers do. Like about subscription models, devops,
| scrum master roles.
| silexia wrote:
| I worked in a company that did not keep tabs unemployees at
| all. I was able to eventually reduce the amount of work it took
| to do my job to about 20 minutes per week. I use that time to
| learn how to program, then left and started an agency.
| blackrock wrote:
| Tell us about your agency.
|
| What have you worked on? How did you find your clients or
| customers or projects?
|
| Is it a consultancy? Or did you develop a marketable product?
|
| What technologies, programming languages, databases, and tech
| stack did you use?
|
| Keep the information anonymous, of course, if you want to
| maintain your privacy.
| one2know wrote:
| Business siders including HR, marketing, sales, product, execs,
| managers etc ALL universally don't work Fridays. They (used to)
| come in for a couple hours then "bunk off" to the bar for lunch
| and happy hour (starts at 3). I find it ridiculous that
| engineers actually do work on Fridays, much less Friday after
| 3pm.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Depends on the place for both counts.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > Still, with all that freedom people don't always use it for
| good, they may actually just bunk off...
|
| Working smart and not hard and reaping the rewards is not
| "bad".
|
| The Protestant work ethic and living to work aren't healthy for
| everyone and I don't really see why we need to assign value
| judgements to people who do or don't subscribe to it.
| lanstin wrote:
| I don't trust software engineers without sufficient laziness.
| teen wrote:
| the policy still exists tho
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Can someone give us a review how the 20% rule works/worked at
| Google? What I've read has always been second hand. Not directly
| from a Googler. I suspect that at the very least the 20% gives
| high employees a way to decompress for a bit by working on
| projects they love rather than ones that they have to do.
| musicale wrote:
| I do like the idea of being able to spend 20% of your time on
| work that is worthwhile, meaningful, rewarding, and that you
| actually enjoy, but I wonder if the percentage could be increased
| somehow, maybe to 50% time or something?
| lanstin wrote:
| The way to do that is to find projects/changes to do that marry
| the business requirements with what you believe is excellent
| and right and should be done. Don't just blindly implement
| requirements and don't just build what you like, but have a
| compelling technical vision and then find other important
| things that justify (to others) building the vision.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| In The Reponsible Company (by the Patagonia founder), he credits
| Googlers doing 20% time to do environmental work. The book is
| really pro-corporation though, heavily a PR piece IMO.
| fnbr wrote:
| I found that to be the case with all of Chouinard's books,
| especially "Let my people go surfing." Tons of lightly veiled
| corporate propaganda.
| [deleted]
| anonygler wrote:
| I think it was great. The problem, in my experience, is that
| everything at Google is just too damn complicated these days.
| It's really hard to make an impact on a hard problem without an
| intense commitment. 20% context switching doesn't cut it.
|
| Linters, code checkers, automation tools, IDE plugins, etc, have
| all been plucked. There's not a lot of low hanging fruit anymore.
| milofeynman wrote:
| We have a form of it called fix-it-friday and I find it helps a
| lot with minor UX improvements and tech debt that would otherwise
| fall in-between the cracks.
| caymanjim wrote:
| This is not 20% time for personal projects. This is is
| scrambling after the fact to fix things that should be done as
| part of the normal development cycle. Formalizing it is
| basically saying "we know our process sucks, but instead of
| fixing it, we're going to sell it as a feature."
| aerovistae wrote:
| You're probably downvoted because it's semi-off-topic, but I
| think it's close enough to be relevant and worth discussing.
|
| Where I work, we dedicate 1 day per sprint to tech debt where
| everyone can just work on fixing whatever they want. It's made
| HUGE differences to the developer experience. So many of the
| things that slow us down and annoy us have gotten fixed this
| way. Sounds about the same as your fix-it-fridays.
| milofeynman wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds about right. It's those little things that
| really help the whole platform long term.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Do you get to choose what to work on? Does it have to be in the
| backlog or can it be something not tracked?
| milofeynman wrote:
| Yup. Some people choose to just do regular feature work,
| others use it to great effect. Some of the best examples are
| slowdowns that sort of fall in-between feature teams, or
| debugging features that help other devs/QA, or tooling that
| helps debug customer issues. I imagine most of the things
| fixed come from annoyances that devs run into that they want
| to improve the product, QA, or tooling experience, customer
| experience.
| klyrs wrote:
| Fridays can be "lame duck" days, and I never start something
| new over after noon. So Fix it Friday is a good way to allocate
| smaller blocks of time for smaller tasks.
|
| But 20% is about side projects. Meeting Free Monday could be a
| good policy to foster those.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I think it was a great outlet for the people who enjoyed using
| it. But most people were busy enough with their regular jobs that
| they did not engage with 20% time.
| gedy wrote:
| I work at a company with 10% time, and TBH most people don't do
| much with it, if at all. A few do and really seem to appreciate
| it. We get more innovation and ideas from hack days.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The problem is that it is very hard to get something big from
| little splotches of time, or at least I find it hard, so I
| focus on little wins.
|
| My company informally allows for spending time like this, but
| if it works out to an hour or two a day in between meetings and
| Slack requests, I can't really do much with that.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Does the 20% need to be distributed evenly, time-wise?
|
| Or could you combine it into a 5-10 week clump between
| projects?
| amf12 wrote:
| Personally, I think it is a good policy for work culture. 20%
| does not just mean you have to work on your own idea but you can
| work on your other passions or to develop your skills. Say you
| are a backend dev and are passionate about ML, you could do a 20%
| with another team which is working on ML and develop your skills
| or just test waters.
|
| If that work has impact you can also include it in your perf.
| iangudger wrote:
| I used 20% time for things that were related to my work, but out
| of scope for my team. For example, I wrote a DNS library in Go
| for work and then I open sourced it [1] and used it to rewrite
| the standard library DNS client [2] as a 20% project. It actually
| worked out really well for me. The promo committee specifically
| called out my DNS project when they approved my promotion and
| ignored the stuff that I had been doing for my team.
|
| [1] https://golang.org/x/net/dns/dnsmessage
|
| [2] https://golang.org/cl/37879
| mdoms wrote:
| I'm not and never was a Googler but at Atlassian we the same
| policy of 20% time and I really do think it was super valuable.
| There are a certain number of developers who will muck around and
| waste their 20% time and there are certain (terrible) team leads
| and PMs who discourage the use of the time because they're
| anxious about their own projects.
|
| But for the most part it contributed massively to the happiness
| of the developers. And the outcomes, in my opinion, were
| invaluable. It's not always visible from the outside, but
| Atlassian now has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built
| with love by developers who were invested in solving their own
| productivity problems.
|
| The quintessential "20% project" is GMail but I think that misses
| the incrementalism that 20% projects really provide. Developers
| will absolutely take advantage of the time to improve their
| personal ergonomics, and everyone around them benefits from that.
|
| But this is obviously very difficult to measure.
| lanstin wrote:
| Honestly I wouldn't agree to have 100% of my effort dictated by
| others. I never had a visa situation but even as a fresh out of
| college worker, I demanded a portion of autonomy. I wouldn't be
| fulfilling what I could do for my employer otherwise. I get odd
| looks for some of the things I get enthusiastic but some of
| them work out. And I learn a lot more about things and in
| particularly the growth of new things from being fully
| responsible for some things. If you are a smart person who can
| code, you absolutely have the labor market power to take
| partial control of your time and effort. I would say you have
| an obligation as a thinking worker to cultivate yourself in
| this way, for the benefit of yourself, your coworkers, and your
| employer.
| mavelikara wrote:
| When you say "100% of my effort", do you include the time you
| spend outside of work hours, or do you include those your
| employer pays you for?
| goalieca wrote:
| > It's not always visible from the outside, but Atlassian now
| has swathes of valuable internal tooling, built with love by
| developers who were invested in solving their own productivity
| problems.
|
| Can we get some of that same love put into the actual business
| products?
| mdoms wrote:
| I no longer work at Atlassian but I spent my last year
| working on a Jira frontend refresh that no customer ever
| asked for and few considered an improvement. So..... no? Haha
| sorry.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Our beloved Trello now has some critical bugs. Makes me
| very sad.
| deviation wrote:
| A missed opportunity... Seems my team spends more time
| complaining about Jira card load times & its interface than
| they do discussing the card..
| paxys wrote:
| A broad, sweeping 20% time was never a thing even at Google. Some
| "rockstars" may have been left alone by their manager to pursue
| such projects, but the average engineer absolutely did not have
| this freedom. It was mostly all marketing.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| I don't know about that. I was no rock star, but my teams let
| me pursue it with no issues circa 2008-2015.
| more_corn wrote:
| At Google the joke was that 20% time was really 120% time since
| you still had to do your day job. I never personally saw a 20%
| time project turn into a product and I never felt comfortable
| taking 20% time. However, I did feel comfortable taking on what I
| saw as important work but which wasn't part of my job description
| --training myself up on it and becoming the go-to person for that
| work.
|
| That part of the culture WAS consciously cultivated and I found
| it very valuable. It drew me up and made me more than I was. It
| was bound up with a culture of open sharing of ideas and cross-
| training. A notion that you could find compelling work at the
| company and shift your focus to that work/team.
|
| There was also an effort to encourage new projects and ideas but
| they didn't go far enough. If I could give one piece of advice
| it's to create explicit approval and some serious financial
| incentives for people who start new products at your company.
| Treat projects like this in the way you'd treat an acquisition of
| the company making that product. E.G. if your company adopts a
| side project as a product, give the creators cash, respect,
| authority, and support to grow it into something great.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I worked at a different company that had implemented a similar
| policy (10% I think?), and generally the problem was the same.
| There was no process to formally accept projects, and no
| formalized way of having managers ignore the productivity loss
| when evaluating people.
|
| I suspect the management liked the concept of having their
| smart engineers invent new products, but ultimately preferred
| buying companies. It somehow seemed less risky even though most
| of the acquisitions failed.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm not a Googler but wasn't Gmail a 20% project? (And maybe
| other Google products that I don't know?)
|
| It seems to me that it would be entirely worth it to Google if
| 99.99% of 20% projects don't go anywhere, but every now and
| then, you get a big hit like Gmail whose newfound revenue
| completely eclipses the lost 20% experimental time from the
| 9999 other employees.
|
| And even for those 9999 other employees, even if their 20%
| projects don't go anywhere, they are likely still hugely
| educational in ways that would make them more productive in the
| other 80%.
| [deleted]
| jmchuster wrote:
| Well, Paul built Gmail in a day, by layering it on top of
| Groups, and that's 20% of a week, so I guess technically,
| yes, it was a 20% project? How it came about, though, is more
| that Paul had been working on email for many years before
| Google, then the execs decided people needed to be working on
| more important impactful projects, and Paul suggested he try
| to build email.
| jayflux wrote:
| > I'm not a Googler but wasn't Gmail a 20% project? (And
| maybe other Google products that I don't know?)
|
| I think the parent meant they didn't see a 20% time project
| come to fruition while they were there, not in general
| tonfa wrote:
| Also I don't think gmail was a 20% project (at least
| according to wikipedia which links to
| http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html):
|
| > [...] they asked me if I wanted to build some type of
| email or personalization product. It was a pretty non-
| specific project charter. They just said, "We think this is
| an interest area." Of course, I was excited to work on
| that.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Sounds like in the early days it was worth something then
| Google became like every other massive corporation and lost
| it's soul!
| Arainach wrote:
| To be fair, 20% doesn't have to be a shipping product. I've had
| coworkers work on things like recruiting projects (running a
| puzzle/coding competition that ran on campuses around the US),
| employee resource groups, internal dashboards for various
| metrics relevant to employees, morale things like massive
| holiday lighting decorations around campus, and so on with 20%
| time. Those have all been very real things that contribute to
| company culture and morale and have "shipped" even if not to
| customers.
| spicyramen wrote:
| We started a 20% project to get stuff done when we were not able
| to get head count. It was related to ML and people that joined
| were actually interested to learn the skill to move to a new team
| or our team. Unfortunately it took a long time before we actually
| got something that was useful. There was not really commitment
| not accountability.
| umaar wrote:
| Not at Google, but rather Shazam.
|
| I've always been a big proponent of 20% time. Shazam is the first
| place I worked at which taught me about them and I've written
| about it here:
|
| https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shaza...
|
| It was the way in which I learnt what I'm passionate about.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Over the last few years, I've used 20% time to:
|
| a) Learn deep learning on audio with a friend, via online
| courses, reading research papers, and re-implementing things.
| Then, to put the knowledge to work, I...
|
| b) Joined a small bioacoustics project working with external
| researchers to level up their ML,
|
| c) Developed some models and deliver some results to the external
| researchers, and, finally,
|
| d) Got hired onto a new team doing ML on Audio full time, largely
| on the strength of recommendations from bioacoustics people.
|
| e) I've kept hacking a bit on bioacoustics, including launching
| the birdsong id kaggle competition earlier this year.
| https://www.kaggle.com/c/birdsong-recognition
|
| IMO, 20% time is "just marketing" until you actually put in the
| personal effort to make something real out of it. Doing so is
| non-trivial, though.
|
| There's a real risk of falling into a 'half-ass two things'
| pattern. It's difficult to do exactly one day a week on some
| project, then cleanly drop it until the following week. Context
| loss is a real problem. This year, I find myself looking out for
| 'low stress' times during my day job to do some deeper dive on
| bioacoustics and create a bunch of new stuff in a kind of sprint,
| rather than consistently setting aside 8 hours a week. It's hard
| to do a research 'sprint' in two areas simultaneously; it's
| better to let a research question take over my brain for a while.
|
| (I also find that my personal limit for meaningfully tracking
| experiment outcomes is two model architectures. I tried three at
| some point this year and it was kind of a disaster.)
|
| It's tough to motivate myself to do important-but-boring things
| like write unit tests in 20% time, which (combined with the
| context shifting problem) has often lead to pain down the line.
|
| All told, it's a hard road, but very rewarding, IMO.
| rvna wrote:
| As someone who's interested in this space, could you point me
| to the resources you used to ramp yourself up?
|
| Also, what are you working on w/ Audio ML?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Hard to point at one thing! I started with a deep learning
| for artists course, and adapted the stuff I saw there to an
| audio mini project. And then started reading the big papers
| in neural networks independently.
|
| I found it helpful to read the source material (eg, ml text
| books and academic papers), paired with blog entries (which
| often have a good basic idea, but skip out get wrong some
| details), and actually building things for my own interests.
|
| On the work side, I'm doing low bit rate speech coding, which
| is good fun.
| wpietri wrote:
| Ooh, I've been doing text-related ML for work, and have been
| tempted to do birdsong recognition for a hobby project over the
| break. Aside from that Kaggle competition, do you have any
| other resources you like?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| If you read a bit of the kaggle discussion you'll find a lot
| of interesting links. The BirdClef competitions have some
| good write ups which, at the very least, will get you to
| dinner best practices for augmentation, which seems to be
| half the problem.
|
| Beyond the web, Nathan Pieplow has a couple great guides to
| birdsong, with excellent introductory essays. There's a
| British book called the Sound Approach to Birding with some
| excellent general propose knowledge, as well.
|
| If you're looking for a fun project which to my knowledge
| hasn't been done, 'birdsong asr' or 'phoneme' transcription
| would be super cool. Feel free to send me an email ($username
| at gmail) if you're actually digging in. :)
| jariel wrote:
| I wonder if '20% time' but on some kind of 'approved' project
| might make sense?
|
| None of us 'fully agree' with the product features set. We all
| have 'that thing' we feel different about.
|
| I wonder if instead of 'work on whatever' - you can just 'work on
| something else, that you really want to' - but that has practical
| value. Like XYZ feature, or creating online training, or that
| researchy thing with the local Uni.
|
| So 'in line with company objectives' but still fun.
|
| Because frankly, Google has been rolling in surplus since day 1,
| they have all the money in the world, that's fundamentally a
| different economic space than companies who are on the line.
| jboggan wrote:
| I worked on a 120% project but was advised not to let my manager
| know about it unless it was successful. Not sure that is an
| indication of it working as intended.
| throwaway60011 wrote:
| The most visible impact was in the company's internal services.
| Many "scratch an itch" tools such as Google bus schedule lookup,
| employee tenure lookup, or massage-room booking originated in 20%
| projects. The "internal social media" of Google such as "moma
| badges" ("achievements" for e.g. writing 100 CLs or contributing
| to a particular fixit -- anyone could add new ones) and the
| internal joke image board "memegen" also originated as 20%
| projects.
|
| This kind of modest, privste service was much lower-commitment
| than trying to single-handedly kick off a new external-facing
| service. Having all these volunteer-built projects around created
| a good vibe of being part of a community of engineers, each
| building whatever we needed to make our days better and sharing
| it with our coworkers.
| axegon_ wrote:
| OK, never worked at Google, most likely never will for a million
| and one reasons but... Could someone eli5: What's a 20% time
| policy?
| detaro wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project
|
| > _The 20% Project is an initiative where company employees are
| allocated twenty-percent of their paid work time to pursue
| personal projects. The objective of the program is to inspire
| innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase
| company potential._
| axegon_ wrote:
| Ah, that... Never knew that was the official name. Thanks!
| Triv888 wrote:
| Personal projects that google owns...
| greesil wrote:
| I have used something like 20% time to help manage technical
| debt, keeping it from consuming our team in web of pain and
| complexity. Usually we come up with a week or two of time every
| quarter to take care of these things, instead of a day a week.
| gotaran wrote:
| Shouldn't that be part of your core responsibilities and not
| "20% time"?
| bwest87 wrote:
| Eh, maybe. Your core responsibility is to ship on time.
| Especially at a startup, it's not only "ok", it's usually the
| "right" call to ship faster, and accumulate technical debt.
| This is constant, and never really goes away. So you tend to
| have to intentionally bake in this time, or else it never
| happens. And I think this is OK! It's not always clear what
| is and isn't technical debt at the time it's being
| introduced. A lot of things seem "gross", but aren't actually
| much of a problem. Or you think, "oh god, this will never
| work when we add X feature", but then you just never add X
| feature, and so it's totally fine 2 years later.
|
| But to your point, of "well shouldn't that intentionality be
| part of normal duties?" Sure, but shouldn't coming up with
| Gmail? Or fixing bugs or UX improvements also be part of
| normal duties? Yes, they all should. The truth is it's hard
| to prioritize small things like that, and it's really hard to
| get a sense for their value as a centralized management team.
| They aren't close enough to the code or the product to always
| know. So I think 20% time is a great way to just decentralize
| that, and allow the engineers closest to the issues to pick
| what's important to work on.
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| I did a 20% project for Google Music back its early days, circa
| 2012. I was working on the Executive Compensation team at the
| time, but running a music blog called Indie Shuffle on the side.
| It's a long time ago, but I seem to recall naivly hoping they'd
| embrace me with arms wide open and invite me to join their team +
| revamp their strategy.
|
| I met with a couple members of their team who were open to
| entertaining me given my background with a music blog. I remember
| being really excited about it - and I spent a _lot_ of time
| preparing a deck about how exposure provided by the Google Music
| blog could be used as leverage to give the platform legitimacy in
| the eyes of independent artists (something that SoundCloud was
| doing really well at the time).
|
| A few senior leaders agreed to let me pitch my ideas, and after a
| fair bit of head-nodding, nothing actually happened.
|
| I ended up leaving Google about 3 months later to take my music
| blog full-time (still up and running at
| https://www.indieshuffle.com, and eventually started a much-more
| successful music venture called SubmitHub -
| https://www.submithub.com). I count myself fortunate to say I
| have no regrets leaving Google.
|
| Reflecting on the idea of 20% projects, I do appreciate that my
| managers gave me the opportunity to explore alternate
| opportunities within the company, and that the Google Music team
| was receptive to me poking my head into their affairs. I think it
| holds a lot of potential when it comes to retaining top talent
| that's at risk of jumping ship for something different, and made
| me feel like I was part of the larger company rather than simply
| stuck in a silo.
| ultimoo wrote:
| Great story, thanks for sharing. What is it like being on
| google's exec compensation team? I had no idea that was a thing
| and would love to listen to any more fun stories (only if
| you're allowed to share).
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| Exec comp is definitely a little-known function of most major
| companies. Normally folks would outsource that type of work
| to consultants, but Google was big enough that it needed 2 of
| us full-time.
|
| We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the
| company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with
| performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations,
| promotions, and more.
|
| The coolest part about it was getting to frequently join
| Laszlo Bock (head of People Ops at the time) when he met
| face-to-face with the CEO (first Eric, then Larry) and the
| SVPs to discuss all of the above. It got to the point where
| they all began to recognize me, which was pretty darn cool as
| a 20-something-year-old.
|
| A byproduct of all that exposure was that I ended up being
| privy to a huge chunk of the "corporate drama" taking place
| in the upper ranks. It's been 7 years since I left, but as
| I'm sure you can understand, getting into details is probably
| a bit of a no-no :)
| specialist wrote:
| I'm so envious of your experiences. Geek me was completely
| oblivious to all that practical stuff.
|
| Scott Galloway (?) has observed that successful
| entrepreneurs and CEOs are nurtured, just like all other
| professionals. So 20 somethings doing leadership stuff are
| more likely to be pretty good once they're 40 somethings.
| Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Michael Dell, many others are
| pretty good examples.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I just wanted to say thank you for creating Indie Shuffle - I
| discovered some of my favourite songs on there! I've found
| music discovery to be quite hard, and Indie Shuffle has been a
| great source for my taste.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Executive Compensation team at the time
|
| What exactly does that work entail?
|
| > A few senior leaders agreed to let me pitch my ideas, and
| after a fair bit of head-nodding, nothing actually happened.
|
| I suspect successful 20% time projects are the ones where
| permission is not required, and don't need someone else to
| implement?
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| > What exactly does that work entail
|
| We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the
| company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with
| performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations,
| promotions, and more.
|
| > I suspect successful 20% time projects are the ones where
| permission is not required, and don't need someone else to
| implement?
|
| Part of my proposal was that they bring me on to help them
| run their fledgling music blog, so it wasn't so much that
| they needed to execute much themselves -- more that they
| needed to decide the music blog was worth having a dedicated
| employee. At the time I think they were more focused on
| trying to get all their licensing ducks in a row.
| Roritharr wrote:
| Your (former) main job sounds like a treasure trove of
| valuable career advice!
| cambalache wrote:
| Many many years ago I started as a junior employee in a
| big company together with a close friend. I was in
| finance, she was in HR. From time to time we had a drink
| to catch up and while I was doing unglamorous grunt work
| she was dealing with things like compensation packages
| for VPs, a short-list for a new regional CEO, the yearly
| ranking of all employees, etc. From time to time she gave
| me morsels of confidential information (like the salary a
| VP was getting or where they were planning to move the
| offices).It was a totally different ball game. That's why
| (among other things) it is very very unwise to cross off
| or even to confess stuff to HR, they are at a different
| level.
|
| A petty thing I noticed with the years is that in HR,
| even very junior people will treat you with condescension
| and a sort of disdain. They know your salary and know
| where you were in the corporate ladder,they deal with the
| CEO packages so you are just a mediocre fish in the pond
| for them.
|
| Skillful HR people also create a pretty solid network so
| if they leave the company they usually land sweet gigs in
| other companies or they can start a consulting agency.
| Out all the places of a corporation HR must be one of the
| best to be. (Cue hundreds of actual HR managers refuting
| me)
| donbrae wrote:
| SubmitHub is awesome! Used it to promote my last couple of EPs.
| jcdavis wrote:
| Oh shit you created indieshuffle?
|
| We're getting way off topic here, but I'm curious what your
| thoughts on the current state of the world on music blogging
| is. I was pretty big into following the music blog/hype machine
| scene in 2010-2014ish, and it seems like the other streaming
| services (particularly Spotify) have more or less killed that
| world with the exceptions of the biggest blogs, which seems
| pretty unfortunate to me.
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| Loaded question! I've done a lot of podcasts/interviews
| lately where I touch on this subject.
|
| Spotify did indeed take away a lot of the "regular listeners"
| from music blogs, but they're not alone in the downfall of
| music blogs as a whole. I think a lot of that can be pegged
| on the way the internet has shifted in general. Music blogs
| lost a lot of things in that 2013-2015 era, including (but
| not limited to):
|
| - A steep drop in advertising revenue (we used to charge $5+
| CPM - but folks learned Google/Facebook were far more
| effective). This wasn't specific to the music blogging
| industry - pretty much all independent publishers went
| through this.
|
| - Google giving 50% of their real-estate for song searches to
| a giant YouTube thumb. Killed SEO for music blogs overnight.
|
| - Technology: Spotify just does music-listening tech better
| than any independent music blog could ever hope to.
|
| So, in an age where Spotify is king and everyone's buzzing
| about TikTok, where do music blogs fit? And are they even
| relevant?
|
| Heck yes they are! Thing is, music blogs are where people
| actually go to _discover music_. Spotify, on the flip side,
| caters toward "passive" listening experiences where they
| make sure you never have to think about it for yourself.
|
| Net result is that for artists a targeted blog promotion
| campaign is still quite important as it can lead to valuable
| exposure within the industry: A&R teams at labels, Spotify
| editorial staff, and festival bookers (RIP) still look to
| music blogs to do the grunt work of sifting through the
| 25,000+ new songs coming out daily.
|
| In 2015 I launched https://www.submithub.com/ to help music
| blogs deal with the hundreds of music submissions they were
| receiving daily. That platform has since taken off - recently
| passing its 16 millionth submission (in less than 5 years).
|
| We allow artists to easily connect with blogs, Spotify
| playlisters, YouTube channels, Instagram/TikTok influencers
| and more -- and compensate those curators for the time they
| spend listening to and considering each submission. And
| believe it or not, one of the most-targeted outlet types on
| there is still the humble "blog".
|
| I could go on for hours, but I'll leave it at that for now :)
| jcdavis wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, make sense.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Love this back and forth. I think I remember submitting a
| track with a collaborator to SubmitHub years ago and
| thinking it was neat that it even existed.
| specialist wrote:
| Was there an exit interview? Was any one curious about your
| plans?
|
| In my future perfect alternate reality:
|
| Google Ventures, GoogleX, or even just thwarted & bored
| midlevel manager aspiring to become an angel investor, would
| offer seed capital to any one turning in their badge.
|
| "Hey @jasongrishkoff, if you ever need some cash for an idea,
| please talk to me first."
|
| In my mind, that parting offer is central to Silicon Valley's
| magic. There's an apocryphal tale about a much disliked boss
| offering seed money to mutinous employees. I thought it was
| Shockley and the Traitorous Eight, but I can't find a cite.
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| They were very supportive of my departure to pursue my own
| business, and I've kept in touch with a number of folks there
| over the years. I was offered a "sabbatical" of sorts
| (assuming things didn't work out), but I declined that on
| grounds that accepting it would convey that I didn't have
| full faith in my ability to make it on my own. Thank goodness
| it all worked out in the end :-D
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Are there any companies out there that allow a 20/80 schedule,
| meaning 80% working on own projects?
| mcherm wrote:
| Yes - the vast majority of open source projects are run this
| way.
|
| The down side is that you don't get paid. And I think that's
| pretty consistent -- no one is going to pay market rates for
| you to spend 80% of your time on "whatever you like".
| ceras wrote:
| AFAIK it still exists. In my several years there, most people
| didn't take full advantage of it, and that was as true in 2011 as
| it was in 2020. Most people just didn't come up with anything a
| technical project they'd rather work on than their core project.
| (I was one of those.)
|
| I think most who took advantage actually worked on improving and
| facilitating employee training & learning programs. Google has
| great internal training material -- mostly for internally-used
| technologies, but sometimes for external technologies people are
| curious about too, and also for soft skills, and even not-work-
| related skills (e.g. fitness classes).
|
| Overall I think the 20% resulted in more "community" work than
| most other companies have, and I think it was a positive for
| company culture.
|
| And for the few people that actually worked on technical
| projects, the existence of 20% time seemed highly motivating for
| them.
| justicezyx wrote:
| 20% when i left Google in 2018-04 is all but gone. It was not
| practiced widely. In my group, Borg, I don't know personally a
| single employee does that. During my tenure at Google from
| 2013-2019, I only know one person did that.
| corobo wrote:
| It was great marketing among developers if nothing else. Don't
| forget the pre-hires!
|
| Nobody just let you do passion projects! Get back to your work
| mondoshawan wrote:
| It was and still is part of our culture.
| enneff wrote:
| Yeah it was great marketing. One of the reasons I so very much
| wanted to join the company. And here I am still, nearly 11
| years later.
|
| I have done some fun stuff in 20% time. Some relatively serious
| projects that went somewhere; enough to keep me entertained.
| It's true that if you have a demanding role it becomes more
| like 120% time. However it's more the spirit of the thing that
| matters; the fact that you're encouraged to pursue your
| interests on work time has led me to learn and experiment more
| than I would have otherwise.
| tlogan wrote:
| The most important thing when building your company is that you
| encourage individual initiative: it might be via 20% or via some
| other ways. It is only reasonable to have 20% in certain
| situations.
|
| In short, focus on the reason why google had this: to encourage
| the initiative. In many corporations showing initiative
| (inventing things, doing more that required, etc.) is a career
| ending move.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I have trouble appreciating the 20% time. What's the fun in doing
| something by yourself? Isn't the exciting part about Google
| working at scale with resources you'd never have anyone else?
| Personally I feel like I would decline on 20% projects.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I work at 3M where we have had this policy for about 100 years.
|
| It's the only reason we still exist; most of our sold products
| were side projects a generation ago.
| jedberg wrote:
| I feel like at a place with expensive lab equipment, 20% time
| can go a lot further. Take smart people and give them a free
| day once a week to use all that expensive equipment they
| couldn't do on their own, and maybe magic happens.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| I feel like access to Google's infrastructure + data
| definitely fits the profile here.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't really think so. Most programming tasks can be done
| with a 2010 year-model computer. In machine engineering
| etc. you need expensive equipment.
| m0zg wrote:
| There never was any real 20% time. It was, as others are saying,
| 120% time, at least if you care about actually moving upward on
| the career ladder.
|
| Paradoxically, this makes it a good policy _for Google_: if
| you're an idiot, you'll put in 120% effort and Google gets more
| work per dollar from you (and gets to deny promo because you
| "spent too much time on your 20% project", as well), if you're
| not an idiot, you will work 8 hours a day, but then spending 20%
| of time on things unrelated to your next promo completely dooms
| your chances of getting it. Some people used to take advantage of
| this, truth be told you're paid pretty well even at the senior
| level, and Google expects most people stay at that level
| indefinitely. Although then there's the question of why one
| wouldn't just take it easy at work and spend their spare time on
| hobbies instead that Google won't own the output of.
|
| OTOH some people are taken in by the Google mythos, and they
| think spending 20% of their time on semi-random shit is
| _conducive_ to their career advancement. You get disabused of
| that notion after applying for a promo even once, which is when
| any experiments with 20% usually cease.
|
| Exceptions are few and far between. To establish this for
| yourself, try to find if people around you promoted to Staff and
| above have any real 20% projects that are actually 20% projects,
| that is, that take substantial time. They don't.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Fwiw I know of more than one person promoted to senior based
| _primarily_ on 20% work.
|
| I'd agree that it becomes rarer at staff+, just because your
| goal is to make cross Google impact and that's difficult in the
| context of most 20% work. But even there I know of people at
| that level who do 20% work. I'm not sure that they're any rarer
| than 20% at lower levels.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| > and gets to deny promo because you "spent too much time on
| your 20% project", as well
|
| or "while that's extremely important and beneficial to Google,
| it's not valuable to this PA. Thus you should unmark yourself
| for promo otherwise our director will tank you in committee."
| True story. :) Glad I'm out of that toxic group; I was able to
| turn my 120% project into my 100% day job and am much happier
| and well rewarded.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Gmail supposedly came from Paul Buchheit building it for his 20%
| time. Likewise, Google News was created by Krishna Bharat for his
| 20% project when he wanted a way to keep up with news after Sept
| 11th.
|
| Are there examples of successful results?
| Cederfjard wrote:
| >large and financially secure startups, say 1k developers and up
|
| Sorry for the tangent, but what's the definition of "startup"
| we're working with here?
| jmtulloss wrote:
| My working definition is something like "pre-product-market-
| fit" or "hockey sticking" growth. Once you saturate your market
| and have to fight for every percentage of growth (or are so big
| that new things can't make a big impact even if they are
| exploding in their niche) then you're no longer a startup
| jmtulloss wrote:
| This also implies that linear growth companies aren't
| startups, they're SMBs. This is probably controversial and
| definitely valley/VC centric.
| dnautics wrote:
| pre-exit, I presume.
| deklerk wrote:
| I've been at Google for 3 years and have 20%ed the entire time
| I've been there on: grpc-go, Drive, and Go tools (gopls, etc).
|
| I think it's fantastic. The whole 120% thing is up to the
| individual: there have been times I've made it a 120%, and there
| are times when it's been just "take a friday off to work on other
| stuff". You end up getting less of your "job" done but my
| managers have always been supportive.
|
| It's been great for sanity: some weeks/months feel just, like,
| meetings and chore work. It's great having that one day a week to
| work on a rockstar feature request in some fun project. It's also
| cool to work on your dream projects without the luck/physical
| move/whatever to get on the actual team. (you can effectively
| work on anything since no project is going to say no to free
| headcount)
|
| It's also nice because it spreads your professional network in
| the directions you choose to spread it, rather than the more
| organic spread that your normal job entails (assuming luck and
| available are big drivers of where and which projects you "end
| up" working, rather than 100% your choice). So, maybe I don't
| work on project X today, but I can 20% on it and build up those
| connections, and later in my career I have a much better shot
| getting on the project. That agency is a nice feeling.
|
| So, as far as the employee happiness goes, I think it's
| fantastic.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Similar experience. I 20% on python...things. some python
| tooling, python3 was a major one, etc. I backed off recently
| just because most things I was involved in are wrapping up, but
| yeah, it was an active area for me. And also I am sort of
| 20%ing on my own project that is greenfield tooling with only
| dubious management support.
|
| It's given me exposure to lots of stuff, I've learned more
| about a favorite language, met some cool people, etc. Not to
| mention earned a handful of bonuses directly related to my 20%
| work.
|
| There's also now done tech debt reduction work that I've been
| tangential to that's clearly a value add, and it's primarily
| 20%ers.
| alacombe wrote:
| > and have 20%ed the entire time I've been there on: grpc-go,
| Drive, and Go tools (gopls, etc).
|
| All Google related projects.
| serial_dev wrote:
| What is the company size where you think a 20% policy like this
| matters? Does it only make sense for large companies like
| Google?
|
| Thank you for your take on these questions, your answer would
| be very much appreciated.
| seangrogg wrote:
| Having formerly worked on 20% projects at Google and now
| working at a small company, I'd say that 20% time can be
| valuable at any size.
|
| For smaller companies it's easy to essentially always have
| feature work which means never really having time for code
| health; anything that wasn't done right the first time will
| be hard pressed to justify getting done ever unless it's
| either breaking something or preventing features. 20% time
| can allow engineers to do something about issues they see and
| care about which could improve things for everyone else in a
| way "one more feature" may not.
| edoceo wrote:
| We do something like this: Maintenance Monday. The dev team
| is just working on the bits of code they think need it,
| cleanup, test case, formatting, all those little things -
| that have no direct customer facing value.
|
| And then we do a Feature Friday so folks can work on the
| fun new stuff (of their choice). It's all company project
| related tho - sometimes loosely - we don't yet have a
| business case for AR/VR or using templates on a Remarkable
| 2 - but maybe - and they are used to spread knowledge
| around the team
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It definitely has more impact imo in organizations that tend
| to specialize and get too big to known everyone.
|
| I worked in a larger technology/shared services team where
| the execs set an expectation of "no email Friday" policy and
| encouraged peer learning and training on Friday afternoons.
|
| It wasn't 100% effective, but helped establish a personal
| development culture, got SMEs talking outside their "turf"
| and sparked a few good projects and staff transitions. (We
| discovered we had a change management guy who was passionate
| about kubernetes)
| deklerk wrote:
| I imagine it's not appropriate for startups, since they're
| burning money fast and mental health appppears to be less of
| a priority? I've not worked at one, so hard to say.
|
| Besides startups, I think it's fair play at companies of all
| sizes. Employees are the most important thing to companies,
| and the overhead of losing trained, context-carrying talent
| tends to be heavy. So, why not let them fulfill that scratch
| and keep them at your company.
|
| I've seen some companies allow 20% on any team within the
| company (rather than any project whatsoever): that could be a
| nice middleground for a company that is unsure about the
| whole thing.
| kk__ wrote:
| Twitch was basically a 20% project at justin.tv.
|
| Let smart people do what they want.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Survivorship bias could be at play. I'm a fan of 20%
| time. Though I think we'd need more data than some
| anecdotes to draw broad conclusions.
| dontTango wrote:
| At my last Engineering job, I would spend slow time
| working on job automation.
|
| That was until my boss flipped his shit one day and
| wanted me to memorize a bunch of shit in my down time.
|
| So instead of automating 6 figure Engineering jobs, I did
| what everyone else does on their slow Time. Facebook!
| ma2rten wrote:
| The myth that 20% time is dead was started by mchurch. He was
| at Google for six month and was let go. He then went on to bad
| mouth the company here and elsewhere online.
|
| 20% time at Google exists and managers are supposed to adjust
| the workload - it's not supposed to be 120% time. That said I
| think it would be hard (but not impossible) to a launch a 20%
| project to external users that doesn't have people working on
| it full-time.
| osipov wrote:
| Really? So is it a myth that 20% time is dead at Google
| Cloud? Or are you one of the folks who doesn't consider
| Google Cloud to be Google?
| wpietri wrote:
| And who was later banned at HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019003
| grenoire wrote:
| (I love dang.)
| [deleted]
| bachmeier wrote:
| I wasn't aware of anyone saying it was dead, but the
| narrative has shifted over time from "work on whatever you
| want one day a week" to "your team might let you spend up to
| one day a week working on something of your choosing if it's
| in the interest of the company". I'm not at Google, and never
| have been, but it's almost certainly the case that the
| narrative has changed - whether or not there was ever a
| change in policy.
| cbb330 wrote:
| How do the teams working full time on a project onboard
| contributors who are doing it with their 20% time?
|
| Naively, I imagine developers would get annoyed or bogged down
| having to skill up these contributors rather than viewing it as
| a "free hand".
| deklerk wrote:
| Others have answered this better than I, but I'll tell you
| what I've seen:
|
| - grpc-go and gopls had great "Contributors welcome" issues
| set up. For both of them, I had to email/chat various people
| for help getting used to the code, but everyone was extremely
| pleasant and helpful (and happy to help). - Drive treated it
| like an internship, where a TL curated a set of low-priority
| issues and I just went and chatted with folks when I had
| questions. Again, everyone was very helpful. - Other Go tools
| I've worked on have had really intuitive codebases, or were
| quite small, and have been easy to dive right in. That's
| helpful too, though I do end up chatting with people a lot.
|
| If I had to make a general statement I guess I would say:
| don't allow 20%ers if you don't have the time for an intern.
| Treat the 20% like an internship: free labour with a little
| bit of extra onboarding. It's ok to not have that time, but I
| think most people are usually happy and excited to provide
| that help! =)
|
| Oh, actual tip: having a myproject-users@ / myproject-devs@
| mailing list, or a #myproject-devs chat channel, goes a long
| way. Then, chatting and asking questions can be informal and
| ad-hoc.
| pcl wrote:
| I think it's incredibly healthy to encourage that sort of
| "visitor" committers in an enterprise codebase, for a couple
| of reasons.
|
| The problems of getting an existing employee up to speed with
| the codebase are a subset of what you need to do to get a new
| hire up and running. And so you really should have a decent
| story for this regardless.
|
| And culturally, it's super-valuable to have a certain
| percentage of visitors, since it helps break down the silos,
| one commit at a time.
|
| The counterpoints, of course, are that no team really wants
| to have to maintain a bunch of crap written by someone who's
| moved on after a quick stab at something, and it sorta sucks
| for the sustaining team if all the "rockstar feature
| requests" (as the GP put it so succinctly) are picked up by
| folks in their 20% time.
|
| The former can be mitigated with a good model for managing
| incoming pull requests, in my experience. The latter is a
| tougher nut to crack.
| singron wrote:
| Particularly at Google, programming languages, code styles,
| common libraries, and tools are incredibly similar between
| teams. There are really low barriers to jumping into someone
| else's codebase. It's not uncommon to review changes to your
| team's codebase from people you have never met (on average,
| maybe weekly?).
|
| Anecdotally I also think a lot of code was generally really
| well documented. There is some effort to document things for
| a general Googler audience (i.e. you should understand most
| of the documentation on any given page without having to read
| all the other docs).
|
| All in all, once you have onboarded into the Google
| ecosystem, it's fairly painless to jump around the codebase.
| amf12 wrote:
| Well, Google values independence and so almost everyone is
| pretty independent. There is also consistency in the internal
| tools, libraries and infra used, so onboarding to the new
| team is just understanding their project. The 20% project
| that you work on is also usually a task that someone can work
| on independently and isn't hi-pri stuff which makes it pretty
| easy.
|
| TL:DR - nobody has to hand hold anybody onboarding 20% - just
| answer basic questions and point to the right resource.
| teen wrote:
| you only hire 1-2 for your team, and it's a longer term
| commitment
| dacracot wrote:
| I'll caveat my remarks first by admitting that I nearly
| completely ignorant of Google's 20% policy, but since it was
| widely advertised, my workplace made a similar statement that one
| half of each Friday should be dedicated to learning something new
| to benefit the team and thereby our careers. All I could ever
| think of after this proclamation was that I was to do as I was
| told 85% of the time and innovate 15%. As a developer, I offended
| that my innovations are devalued to a time slot. I was under the
| impression that I was expected to innovate continuously within
| the confines of the deadlines given. My two cents.
| dub wrote:
| In the heyday of 20% time, Google had more money than they knew
| what to do with and the engineers were generally overqualified.
| Remember that in the early 2000s Google was famous for hiring
| people with PhDs and asking them build web servers.
|
| Within that climate, 20% time was a great policy. Nobody needed
| "permission" to take a day out of the week to write a better
| source code management workflow or a config file VIM code
| completion for the internal codebase or improve build times or
| fix an annoying bug in another team's codebase, or even just
| generate good will for the company by contributing to open source
| projects. It was good for the company, and good for morale.
| yodon wrote:
| The way I've heard it expressed is "if you want to hire
| racehorses, sometimes you've just got to let them run"
| Privacy846 wrote:
| I don't understand. A PhD is a degree in research. If you have
| a PhD and are building web servers you sound misqualified.
| topkai22 wrote:
| That's exactly the point- Google in that time frame did a TON
| of prestige hiring, whether or not it made sense for the
| actual work they needed to fill.
| Privacy846 wrote:
| That's not what I got from the original comment.
| cambalache wrote:
| How so? That was entirely the point
| [deleted]
| whateveracct wrote:
| At my company (BigCo but not FAANG or SV), we have 20% time, but
| it's more for personal learning than side projects (and when it
| is projects, it's fine if those are just to learn, and not to
| help the company directly.)
|
| Execs call it out and focus on it too, so managers will even be
| happy to hear you're using it (and say "what can we do to get
| people to feel like they can use it?")
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I worked at Google 2006-2009. I joined a 20% project with an
| awesome staff engineer, then recruiting one of my team-mates to
| join 20% too. We ended up working on it full-time. It didn't end
| up launching but I think the core code ended up being used as
| part of other products. It was incredibly rewarding and a great
| outlet from my typical day-to-day improving Adwords.
| bwest87 wrote:
| I never worked at Google, but I did work for a different, fairly
| well known consumer tech company doing a lot of work around "hack
| time". While there, they didn't have any such program, and I
| really wanted there to be one. So I helped implement a program
| for "hack time", which was pretty close to 20% time. I did
| surveys of over 100 engineers, put together a presentation for
| leadership, got directors of various eng departments on board,
| did a pilot program, then did post-surveys and presentations to
| gauge impact. We also spent time with managers to make sure they
| were on board, and made it clear to their direct reports that
| they were on board, and that it was _OK_ to use hack time. The
| point is, we really tried to do this right, and get people to use
| the time, and assess if it was actually valuable.
|
| We did this for a quarter across a few different large eng teams.
| We eventually shut it down. My high level takeaways were the
| following... * Way more engineers *say* they're
| into doing hack projects than actually ended up doing them. We
| had huge initial survey response of people saying they wanted to
| do something, and only ended up having like 5-ish projects that
| were seen through. And there were probably 20ish projects that
| started at the beginning of the quarter. So large drop-off.
| * BUT! That can be totally fine! Many people who actually used
| hack time were some of the best engineers at the company. Other
| ones were some of the newest at the company. You're really
| helping job satisfaction for those top engineers, and really
| helping mentorship and learning for the new engineers.
| * I now believe it's better to have regular highly condensed hack
| weeks (or hack days if you're a small company), rather than a
| spread out "20% time". Even people who really liked hack time
| found it hard to actually take the time when deadlines were
| approaching. But when you just eliminate those things with a
| condensed period of hacking, then people can focus. You also tend
| to increase participation considerably through this method. (I
| know cause we did this method as well) * Stop trying to
| create Gmail in your hack time! A lot of the most valuable stuff
| to come out of hacking was internal tools, refactors, and little
| things that improved daily quality of life around the company.
| (ie. someone made a batch upload tool for the customer support
| team that they *loved*!). Or small UX improvements for customers.
| Some people did try to create certain new products, but it's
| super rare that those make it into the main product Not saying it
| can't, or won't, or even that you shouldn't do it. But as a
| general rule, the best you can hope for there is you've de-risked
| a new feature, or gotten your manager excited about the
| possibility, and they'll slot in time to "do it for real" in the
| next quarter. Realistically, people tend to have more fun just
| making stuff that they actually can see the value of the next
| day. Or when they get to hear thank you emails immediately from a
| whole other team. * You get a lot of other value from hack
| time besides break-through products. Specifically, you get people
| across teams mingling with each other. You get new and
| experienced engineers hanging out. You get a feeling of autonomy.
| People learn new tech or new parts of the company. For example, I
| made one of my most lasting relationships at that company by just
| randomly deciding to join his hack team for a hackathon project.
| I also got to use GraphQL and React for the first time on that
| project.
|
| Overall, I think hack time/ 20% time / whatever you want to call
| it is very very valuable, and companies of all sizes should do
| it. But you have to do it right, and you have to go in with the
| right mindset about _why_ you 're doing it. Do it because it's
| _fun_. Do it because you help your company meet one another. Do
| it because you 'll probably improve the daily quality of life in
| small tangible ways for a lot of people for your customers, or
| for other employees. Do it to give your engineers some autonomy.
| Don't do it _in order to get your next Gmail_.
| mondoshawan wrote:
| Current Googler -- AFAIK, 20% time is still a thing. You just
| have to clarify the project with your manager, just like you did
| before. I utilized it to write the Mendel development tool (mdt)
| for Coral boards here: https://pypi.org/project/mendel-
| development-tool/
|
| On my current project, I have other Googlers spending 20% time to
| help the team I lead as well.
|
| 20% is very much still a thing here.
| osipov wrote:
| Not at Google Cloud
| khazhoux wrote:
| From my time there, the most important thing about 20% time, from
| my POV, was _the message_ to all engineers that innovation,
| personal growth, and expanding the boundaries of your work, is
| _important to the company_. It was less important whether you
| really engaged in a true 20% or not. The point was that the
| company very loudly endorsed the idea of it -- even if in
| practice, it was hard to get right.
| vl wrote:
| I worked there in 2010s and almost nobody was utilizing it
| anymore since general incentives were not aligned: it was hard to
| cut out time from your main project, and on top of the you had to
| pre-justify your 20% project as useful, which is for 20% project
| often more work than the project itself.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've always wondered what the accountability for 20% time was.
| Did you check-in on your project with a manager? Did you present
| it at some demo meeting? If sufficient progress wasn't being
| made, did someone "encourage" you to change projects?
| bwest87 wrote:
| You can do it a few ways. But in my experience, the simplest
| and best way is to force people to demo _something_ at a pre-
| specified time. If you 're doing it "hackathon" style, then it
| should be at the end of the hackathon. If you're doing it 20%
| style, then probably end of the quarter? You could do it with
| zero accountability, but having tried to run these programs
| (see my other top-level reply here), I think you'll mostly get
| a lot of people not doing much if you don't have any
| accountability.
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