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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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%.

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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.

It's important to remember the difference between the old Google with ~1k people and today's Google with 100k+ people. Things were a lot more flexible back when gmail was a new thing. I started at G in 2005 when there were 6k engineers, but it was doubling every 9-12 months. You could watch the ossification in real time. My experience was definitely one of 120% time. Some people made 20% projects actually work, but that became more rare over time.

Yeah, I was there 2006-2009, and each year I got another layer of management above me:)

I'm sure there were area where 20% time was real, but in my department it was pretty much non existent.

> 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

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.

Sounds like in the early days it was worth something then Google became like every other massive corporation and lost it's soul!

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