I wish that 20%-time policies worked, but they don't.
I think they're actually quite bad for morale in the long run. Why? People who have good rapport with their managers and are implicitly trusted will graduate to self-directed work within less than a year and be full-fledged "intrapreneurs" (i.e. have most of the autonomy that a startup founder would have, if not the same upside) within 2 or 3. You don't need a 20%-time policy to back that up. It naturally happens. So 20%-time policies exist to set a minimum on the allowance for self-directed work, but here's the problem: people who don't win the implicit trust of their managers get pissed off and disgusted-- regardless of whether they're working 32 or 40 or 50 hours per week-- and no side project can fix that: the only solution is for the employee to transfer before he burns out and gets fired.
A 20%-time policy dangles a carrot. It reminds the people who don't have autonomy and implicit trust of what their work lives would be like if they had better managers.
20%-time often becomes a negative space and a justification for reducing employee autonomy during the other 80%. You want to mentor interns? Maintain a legacy module you depend on? Work on a cross-hierarchical project (from a cynical manager's PoV, this looks like a careerist attempt to become a "socialite" within the company rather than remaining under one thumb)? That's what 20% time is for.
Also, 20% time might have been a real benefit in 1975 when average people didn't have access to a computer, but in 2012, most people would be happier just taking a day off to work on a side project. If you get fired or quit, you still have your side projects, but your 20%-time project ends up in /dev/null.
Finally, here's a dirty secret about what has happened in the professions. Until about 1980, it was typically understood that metered work (i.e. what your boss is directly asking you do to) expectations in the professions would be about 20 to 25 hours per week. A boss who asked for more than that, except with an aggressive once-in-a-career type deadline, was setting an unreasonable expectation. The other 20-25 hours were to be spent on off-meter work, such as networking, continued education, and research-oriented side projects that might not work out but would teach something in the process, all of which were intended to keep the professional current and improve his or her long-term career. After the slow-motion terrorist attack that was the Reagan era and aggressive corporate cost-cutting, that devolved. The new expectation, after that, became 40+ hours of metered work, and any off-meter work was to happen on your own time. (The consequence of this is that most professionals don't learn much and are replaced by younger versions of themselves when they burn out.) So "20% time" is just a ghost to remind us of what things were like back when the professions really were professions.
> Until about 1980, it was typically understood that metered work (i.e. what your boss is directly asking you do to) expectations in the professions would be about 20 to 25 hours per week.
I would love to read more about this, if you have any links or such.
"Too good" to be true is a bit of a stretch, because it wasn't all good. The professions in that day were ethnically exclusive, connections driven, and the everyday work was generally pretty dull. Also, getting fired seriously fucked up your life and reputation (rather than being the mild annoyance it is today, for a skilled software engineer) and so offices tended to be a lot more authoritarian. Watch Mad Men to get a sense of it. Sticking around the office till 6:30 meant you were a hard worker, but it wasn't all pleasant, and for a lot of people who, by all rights, would deserve the chance to get in, couldn't.
However, the professions did expect people to dedicate half their time to off-meter work, and were more reasonable about allowing people to do that and have 40-50 hour work weeks. That aspect of it is true. This doesn't mean that you could work only 20 hours per week if you decided off-meter work wasn't your thing. It does mean that you had the autonomy of an actual professional.
I don't have any off-hand, but one well-studied case in point is the concept of "billable hours" in law firms. Attorney were expected to bill 1200 hours to the client. They were still working 40 hours per week, but the other 880 were spent on continuing education, meeting clients, etc.
Today, the expectation is 2000 billable hours. That makes for about a 60-hour work week. If you're a 7th-year associate trying to make partner, you have to bill 2000 hours (metered work) and drum up business on your own time.
In the white-shoe days, attorneys were expected to bill 1200 hours per year, which comes out to 23 per week. There was still a 40-hour expectation, but they could spend the rest of their time on self-directed pursuits professional/career development, networking, looking for clients, and call it "work".
Now, attorneys in those firms are expected to bill 2000 hours, which means they have to be putting a full-time commitment to just billing, and any professional development or networking has to come on top of that.
While your statements may be true for a larger company, 20% time is working quite well for our consulting company for myriad reasons.
First, of course, there's the opportunity to work on side projects. The only stipulation is that it implicitly (for very loose definitions of implicitly) helps the company. Write open source code, write a blog post, work on your own internal project... but mostly it's been OSS hacking.
Second, it builds slack into our schedule. We (http://bendyworks.com) are a consulting company, and 20% time frees us to "promise" 4 days of work to our clients. And when the inevitable vacation day, sick day or holiday comes up, the client still gets their 4 days of work.
It also lets us push our book club into Friday, which makes it affect our clients' projects even less.
And for a good portion of us, a single day simply isn't enough to satisfy our hunger, so you'll often see a few hanging out at the office, hacking away on the latest clojure, ruby, raspberry pi, or life-hacking project.
I don't think it has that much to do with the size of the company though, but more with the difference between a consulting company and a product company.
In a consulting company, work is time-driven: every hour of work is intended to be billed to a customer. This makes the company very focused on time which makes it easier to dedicate X% of that time to individual's projects. In product companies, work is typically much more result-driven, which makes it more difficult to correctly attribute each worked hour of time to any specific activity. As a consequence, it is much more difficult to do these "X% projects" in part because the X is tricky to correctly measure and attribute.
[disclaimer: I work for Google]
First point: 20% can work very well. Michael misrepresents the scope of 20% time in one signficant way: it need not be self-directed work at all. One of my 20%s was in fact contributing to the Ads pipeline, for the simple reasons that I was interested in learning about what they did, liked the people who worked on it and with them identified a project that they would not be able to get to soon.
I've also had the other type of 20%: A Program manager I knew had an idea and after a hallway conversation, we turned it into a 2 and then 3 person 20% project which involved hardware, embedded and server-side software development and deployment.
In neither of these cases was my manager particularly adept at managing either my time or my main project; it was my doing. I assumed that I had the right to 20% time and basically forged ahead until I was told otherwise, which I never was.
Michael, your repetitive anti-Google (in every aspect) speeches lack credibility for a number of reasons; the most blatant of which is that you simply did not work here long enough to have suffered the injustices that you claim to have. If you had been here longer or made any kind of effort to adapt to your environment, you may have found that 20% time can really be rewarding.
Comments
I wish that 20%-time policies worked, but they don't.
I think they're actually quite bad for morale in the long run. Why? People who have good rapport with their managers and are implicitly trusted will graduate to self-directed work within less than a year and be full-fledged "intrapreneurs" (i.e. have most of the autonomy that a startup founder would have, if not the same upside) within 2 or 3. You don't need a 20%-time policy to back that up. It naturally happens. So 20%-time policies exist to set a minimum on the allowance for self-directed work, but here's the problem: people who don't win the implicit trust of their managers get pissed off and disgusted-- regardless of whether they're working 32 or 40 or 50 hours per week-- and no side project can fix that: the only solution is for the employee to transfer before he burns out and gets fired.
A 20%-time policy dangles a carrot. It reminds the people who don't have autonomy and implicit trust of what their work lives would be like if they had better managers.
20%-time often becomes a negative space and a justification for reducing employee autonomy during the other 80%. You want to mentor interns? Maintain a legacy module you depend on? Work on a cross-hierarchical project (from a cynical manager's PoV, this looks like a careerist attempt to become a "socialite" within the company rather than remaining under one thumb)? That's what 20% time is for.
Also, 20% time might have been a real benefit in 1975 when average people didn't have access to a computer, but in 2012, most people would be happier just taking a day off to work on a side project. If you get fired or quit, you still have your side projects, but your 20%-time project ends up in /dev/null.
Finally, here's a dirty secret about what has happened in the professions. Until about 1980, it was typically understood that metered work (i.e. what your boss is directly asking you do to) expectations in the professions would be about 20 to 25 hours per week. A boss who asked for more than that, except with an aggressive once-in-a-career type deadline, was setting an unreasonable expectation. The other 20-25 hours were to be spent on off-meter work, such as networking, continued education, and research-oriented side projects that might not work out but would teach something in the process, all of which were intended to keep the professional current and improve his or her long-term career. After the slow-motion terrorist attack that was the Reagan era and aggressive corporate cost-cutting, that devolved. The new expectation, after that, became 40+ hours of metered work, and any off-meter work was to happen on your own time. (The consequence of this is that most professionals don't learn much and are replaced by younger versions of themselves when they burn out.) So "20% time" is just a ghost to remind us of what things were like back when the professions really were professions.
> Until about 1980, it was typically understood that metered work (i.e. what your boss is directly asking you do to) expectations in the professions would be about 20 to 25 hours per week.
I would love to read more about this, if you have any links or such.
I second this. Sounds like it might be a bit too good to be true.
"Too good" to be true is a bit of a stretch, because it wasn't all good. The professions in that day were ethnically exclusive, connections driven, and the everyday work was generally pretty dull. Also, getting fired seriously fucked up your life and reputation (rather than being the mild annoyance it is today, for a skilled software engineer) and so offices tended to be a lot more authoritarian. Watch Mad Men to get a sense of it. Sticking around the office till 6:30 meant you were a hard worker, but it wasn't all pleasant, and for a lot of people who, by all rights, would deserve the chance to get in, couldn't.
However, the professions did expect people to dedicate half their time to off-meter work, and were more reasonable about allowing people to do that and have 40-50 hour work weeks. That aspect of it is true. This doesn't mean that you could work only 20 hours per week if you decided off-meter work wasn't your thing. It does mean that you had the autonomy of an actual professional.
I don't have any off-hand, but one well-studied case in point is the concept of "billable hours" in law firms. Attorney were expected to bill 1200 hours to the client. They were still working 40 hours per week, but the other 880 were spent on continuing education, meeting clients, etc.
Today, the expectation is 2000 billable hours. That makes for about a 60-hour work week. If you're a 7th-year associate trying to make partner, you have to bill 2000 hours (metered work) and drum up business on your own time.
This is 1200/2000 billable hours per year? I'm not following the math.
In the white-shoe days, attorneys were expected to bill 1200 hours per year, which comes out to 23 per week. There was still a 40-hour expectation, but they could spend the rest of their time on self-directed pursuits professional/career development, networking, looking for clients, and call it "work".
Now, attorneys in those firms are expected to bill 2000 hours, which means they have to be putting a full-time commitment to just billing, and any professional development or networking has to come on top of that.
While your statements may be true for a larger company, 20% time is working quite well for our consulting company for myriad reasons.
First, of course, there's the opportunity to work on side projects. The only stipulation is that it implicitly (for very loose definitions of implicitly) helps the company. Write open source code, write a blog post, work on your own internal project... but mostly it's been OSS hacking.
Second, it builds slack into our schedule. We (http://bendyworks.com) are a consulting company, and 20% time frees us to "promise" 4 days of work to our clients. And when the inevitable vacation day, sick day or holiday comes up, the client still gets their 4 days of work.
It also lets us push our book club into Friday, which makes it affect our clients' projects even less.
And for a good portion of us, a single day simply isn't enough to satisfy our hunger, so you'll often see a few hanging out at the office, hacking away on the latest clojure, ruby, raspberry pi, or life-hacking project.
I don't think it has that much to do with the size of the company though, but more with the difference between a consulting company and a product company.
In a consulting company, work is time-driven: every hour of work is intended to be billed to a customer. This makes the company very focused on time which makes it easier to dedicate X% of that time to individual's projects. In product companies, work is typically much more result-driven, which makes it more difficult to correctly attribute each worked hour of time to any specific activity. As a consequence, it is much more difficult to do these "X% projects" in part because the X is tricky to correctly measure and attribute.
[disclaimer: I work for Google] First point: 20% can work very well. Michael misrepresents the scope of 20% time in one signficant way: it need not be self-directed work at all. One of my 20%s was in fact contributing to the Ads pipeline, for the simple reasons that I was interested in learning about what they did, liked the people who worked on it and with them identified a project that they would not be able to get to soon.
I've also had the other type of 20%: A Program manager I knew had an idea and after a hallway conversation, we turned it into a 2 and then 3 person 20% project which involved hardware, embedded and server-side software development and deployment.
In neither of these cases was my manager particularly adept at managing either my time or my main project; it was my doing. I assumed that I had the right to 20% time and basically forged ahead until I was told otherwise, which I never was.
Michael, your repetitive anti-Google (in every aspect) speeches lack credibility for a number of reasons; the most blatant of which is that you simply did not work here long enough to have suffered the injustices that you claim to have. If you had been here longer or made any kind of effort to adapt to your environment, you may have found that 20% time can really be rewarding.