Can anybody confirm if the 20% in google still stands?
And, if it does, is it really 20% of the regular work hours? In my experience, 20% usually comes to something like: "Work on the important project 100% of the work week. After that, work 20% more on something you like."
Everybody I know that works in Google, works far more than the standard 40h per week. Even if you cut of 20% of that time, they still work more than usual. Ofc, that doesn't mean it is generally the case, that's why I'm asking.
My "moles" have been telling me it's dead. What it meant in practice during my tenure (which predated most of the corporate hell courtesy of the new CEO) was this: if you want to go noodle around with someone else's code, you have a built-in excuse... and a limiter.
That by itself was useful since you could go play around in other parts of the company and nobody could give you grief for it. Now it seems to have joined many other things which effectively are no more. The old reputation is hard to shake, and that's why you still see these PR pieces about how lovely it is to work there.
Of course, this only makes sense when the code depots are actually open to viewing or modification. When you start having more and more things closed off (how's that components thing going, anyway?), there are fewer opportunities to randomly hack on stuff. Also, if your manager hates you, forget it. It's seen as goofing off.
20% time is a negative space. The distinction (although this wasn't the intent) just reminds you that, during 80% of your time, you're a manager's bitch. It was supposed to set a minimum on self-directed work (i.e. "no manager can deny you this") but it became a maximum. Which might be okay if you're making hedge-fund money and can cash out after a few years, but for typical middle-class compensation, no one is going to work hard (and 40 hpw is working hard if you actually work during most of that time) for more than 2 years without graduating to a position of full autonomy and some influence.
None of us are working to be peons. We're working because we want to be substantial some day, and substantial people aren't happy controlling only 10 or 20 percent of our working time. We'll put up with that in our first 6-12 months on a job because we're FNGs still trying to learn the ropes and become useful, but anyone ambitious is going to want, at least, to be implicitly trusted with his or her time after one year.
One problem with 20%T is that a lot of people end up using it to do work that decent companies would allow people to credit as regular work, such as teaching classes, mentoring interns, and maintaining legacy code on which their product relies. WTF, Google? That is straight-up regular work that deserves credit toward 80% time.
What happens in practice with 20% time, and this is why a lot of managers hate it, is that people who use it for real (not just "goofing off", but actually trying to accomplish something) end up becoming a lot more passionate about it than their regular project. (The few people at Google who are lucky enough to get interesting work rarely use 20% time, at least not officially.) Even if they're technically putting 32 hours into their regular work, their 20%-time project grows from 8 hours to 18, then 30, then 50. Which means that either (a) they're not really putting in 32h on their main project, or (b) they are, but they're working 70+ hour weeks and their per-hour efficiency has plummeted, especially because they're using their best and most energetic hours on side projects.
While something like gmail may have come from 20% time, Google's 20% time is a marketing ploy. I don't think we're going to find a response where it is really 20% instead of 120% at Google.
To make it "stick" I think you really have to block out a specific part of the schedule, if that's possible, like designating Thursdays for only 20%-project work (barring emergencies). Sort of like the way Richard Hamming blocked out a specific 10% of his schedule (past noon on Fridays) in which he refrained from working on his regular projects, and only discussed blue-skies research.
It depends on your manager. Despite Google's claims of being post-managerial and peer-driven, the truth is that your manager has free rein to ass-rape you if he perceives you as being distracted by your 20% project. That's because your actual progress requires both good peer reviews and good "calibration scores"-- which are quarterly, manager-assigned, and secret. (Managers aren't supposed to tell employees their scores aside from a 0.5-point interval on a scale where that's a huge range, and people have gotten in hot water for asking or trying to bargain.)
Since you have to pass two (sometimes) conflicting tests, you get the worst of both systems. You get old-school managerial abuse and the careerist jockeying for visibility that occurs when large companies attempt to be "peer-driven". Instead of offering two paths to success, Google offers two orthogonal roadblocks, both of which must be overcome.
20% time is alive and well if you have a supportive (i.e. good) manager. If you have a typical manager, you can probably get away with 20%T as long as it's not obvious. If you have an evil manager, then watch the fuck out. There's a 5% cutoff for PIPs (the bureaucratic humiliation derived from the principle that it's better to keep a fired employee around for 2 months pissing all over morale than to cut a severance check) and having a 20%T project is an easy way to end up on the hitlist.
The danger of 20% time at a place like Google is that (a) the best work is awesome, but most of the work isn't very interesting, so (b) pretty much everyone is trying to get on a better project (and starts campaigning from about the 7th week) and (c) managers know this and don't like people who make it obvious. 20-percenters are either trying to transfer (that's the best use of 20%T) or to start something up within Google (which expresses the same flight risk, but is far less likely to work). So if a manager has to throw someone under the bus because a team is underperforming and doesn't have enough "calibration" points, 20-percenters (flight risks) are the first ones to go.
On Pref, from http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/promotion-systems-redux.htm... :
“In any case, I think it’s very healthy for Google to have an internal discussion about this. But do I expect the system to change? No. The super-star rule I referred to in that previous post would prevent that. I did have a discussion with a VP about this. He told me that when he first joined Google, he tried to change the promotion criteria to better formally recognize leadership, mentoring, and the importance of spreading knowledge (technical or otherwise) throughout the organization. The result? A bunch of very senior engineers (who had all benefited under the current regime, and were understandably worried about their career prospects under a different system) shouted him down.”
How would you suggest solving this problem?
I'm agnostic on whether Page is really responsible in any way for Google's decline. I joined after he stepped in. I don't know anything about Page, but he seems to be a bad judge of character because of some of the things he has allowed and some policies he's supported.
What happened post-Schmidt wasn't directly Page's fault, so much as a lot of the other executives were waiting in the wings with shitty ideas that they now saw a chance to push through. Execs will attempt that any time there's a guard change, and I can't say that Page did a worse job of handling it than I would have done.
I asked a successful business owner what the hardest thing was about being CEO and he said (paraphrased) that "The job is easy, in that you have the power to have work done, but the hard part is that everyone is fucking lying to you." I don't think Page is a good judge of when people are lying to him.
I don't think any of Google's triumvirate (Page, Brin, Schmidt) are bad men. I think they're very good men who built an admirable company and kept it intact for a long time. I think they lack something in the ability to judge character (mea culpa: so do I; I tend to be too trusting of individuals despite my intellectual cynicism) which is why a lot of the middle managers and executives are problematic.
Then again, 90% of the cultural rot occurred before Page. Google's hideous "calibration score" system wasn't built in a day.
Comments
Can anybody confirm if the 20% in google still stands?
And, if it does, is it really 20% of the regular work hours? In my experience, 20% usually comes to something like: "Work on the important project 100% of the work week. After that, work 20% more on something you like."
Everybody I know that works in Google, works far more than the standard 40h per week. Even if you cut of 20% of that time, they still work more than usual. Ofc, that doesn't mean it is generally the case, that's why I'm asking.
My "moles" have been telling me it's dead. What it meant in practice during my tenure (which predated most of the corporate hell courtesy of the new CEO) was this: if you want to go noodle around with someone else's code, you have a built-in excuse... and a limiter.
That by itself was useful since you could go play around in other parts of the company and nobody could give you grief for it. Now it seems to have joined many other things which effectively are no more. The old reputation is hard to shake, and that's why you still see these PR pieces about how lovely it is to work there.
Of course, this only makes sense when the code depots are actually open to viewing or modification. When you start having more and more things closed off (how's that components thing going, anyway?), there are fewer opportunities to randomly hack on stuff. Also, if your manager hates you, forget it. It's seen as goofing off.
20% time is a negative space. The distinction (although this wasn't the intent) just reminds you that, during 80% of your time, you're a manager's bitch. It was supposed to set a minimum on self-directed work (i.e. "no manager can deny you this") but it became a maximum. Which might be okay if you're making hedge-fund money and can cash out after a few years, but for typical middle-class compensation, no one is going to work hard (and 40 hpw is working hard if you actually work during most of that time) for more than 2 years without graduating to a position of full autonomy and some influence.
None of us are working to be peons. We're working because we want to be substantial some day, and substantial people aren't happy controlling only 10 or 20 percent of our working time. We'll put up with that in our first 6-12 months on a job because we're FNGs still trying to learn the ropes and become useful, but anyone ambitious is going to want, at least, to be implicitly trusted with his or her time after one year.
One problem with 20%T is that a lot of people end up using it to do work that decent companies would allow people to credit as regular work, such as teaching classes, mentoring interns, and maintaining legacy code on which their product relies. WTF, Google? That is straight-up regular work that deserves credit toward 80% time.
What happens in practice with 20% time, and this is why a lot of managers hate it, is that people who use it for real (not just "goofing off", but actually trying to accomplish something) end up becoming a lot more passionate about it than their regular project. (The few people at Google who are lucky enough to get interesting work rarely use 20% time, at least not officially.) Even if they're technically putting 32 hours into their regular work, their 20%-time project grows from 8 hours to 18, then 30, then 50. Which means that either (a) they're not really putting in 32h on their main project, or (b) they are, but they're working 70+ hour weeks and their per-hour efficiency has plummeted, especially because they're using their best and most energetic hours on side projects.
While something like gmail may have come from 20% time, Google's 20% time is a marketing ploy. I don't think we're going to find a response where it is really 20% instead of 120% at Google.
To make it "stick" I think you really have to block out a specific part of the schedule, if that's possible, like designating Thursdays for only 20%-project work (barring emergencies). Sort of like the way Richard Hamming blocked out a specific 10% of his schedule (past noon on Fridays) in which he refrained from working on his regular projects, and only discussed blue-skies research.
It depends on your manager. Despite Google's claims of being post-managerial and peer-driven, the truth is that your manager has free rein to ass-rape you if he perceives you as being distracted by your 20% project. That's because your actual progress requires both good peer reviews and good "calibration scores"-- which are quarterly, manager-assigned, and secret. (Managers aren't supposed to tell employees their scores aside from a 0.5-point interval on a scale where that's a huge range, and people have gotten in hot water for asking or trying to bargain.)
Since you have to pass two (sometimes) conflicting tests, you get the worst of both systems. You get old-school managerial abuse and the careerist jockeying for visibility that occurs when large companies attempt to be "peer-driven". Instead of offering two paths to success, Google offers two orthogonal roadblocks, both of which must be overcome.
20% time is alive and well if you have a supportive (i.e. good) manager. If you have a typical manager, you can probably get away with 20%T as long as it's not obvious. If you have an evil manager, then watch the fuck out. There's a 5% cutoff for PIPs (the bureaucratic humiliation derived from the principle that it's better to keep a fired employee around for 2 months pissing all over morale than to cut a severance check) and having a 20%T project is an easy way to end up on the hitlist.
The danger of 20% time at a place like Google is that (a) the best work is awesome, but most of the work isn't very interesting, so (b) pretty much everyone is trying to get on a better project (and starts campaigning from about the 7th week) and (c) managers know this and don't like people who make it obvious. 20-percenters are either trying to transfer (that's the best use of 20%T) or to start something up within Google (which expresses the same flight risk, but is far less likely to work). So if a manager has to throw someone under the bus because a team is underperforming and doesn't have enough "calibration" points, 20-percenters (flight risks) are the first ones to go.
On Pref, from http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/promotion-systems-redux.htm... : “In any case, I think it’s very healthy for Google to have an internal discussion about this. But do I expect the system to change? No. The super-star rule I referred to in that previous post would prevent that. I did have a discussion with a VP about this. He told me that when he first joined Google, he tried to change the promotion criteria to better formally recognize leadership, mentoring, and the importance of spreading knowledge (technical or otherwise) throughout the organization. The result? A bunch of very senior engineers (who had all benefited under the current regime, and were understandably worried about their career prospects under a different system) shouted him down.” How would you suggest solving this problem?
How would you suggest solving this problem?
Fire Larry Page. [i.e., it ain't gonna happen]
What is the problem with Larry Page that require him to go?
I'm agnostic on whether Page is really responsible in any way for Google's decline. I joined after he stepped in. I don't know anything about Page, but he seems to be a bad judge of character because of some of the things he has allowed and some policies he's supported.
What happened post-Schmidt wasn't directly Page's fault, so much as a lot of the other executives were waiting in the wings with shitty ideas that they now saw a chance to push through. Execs will attempt that any time there's a guard change, and I can't say that Page did a worse job of handling it than I would have done.
I asked a successful business owner what the hardest thing was about being CEO and he said (paraphrased) that "The job is easy, in that you have the power to have work done, but the hard part is that everyone is fucking lying to you." I don't think Page is a good judge of when people are lying to him.
I don't think any of Google's triumvirate (Page, Brin, Schmidt) are bad men. I think they're very good men who built an admirable company and kept it intact for a long time. I think they lack something in the ability to judge character (mea culpa: so do I; I tend to be too trusting of individuals despite my intellectual cynicism) which is why a lot of the middle managers and executives are problematic.
Then again, 90% of the cultural rot occurred before Page. Google's hideous "calibration score" system wasn't built in a day.
Yea, that is why I ask questions like what would you suggest to the Google founders.
Bring me on as a consultant. I could have saved Google+ Games; the documentation is probably still there.
This was incredibly insightful. How long ago do you think it all changed? Do you think it's a function of the size that Google has grown to?