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Comment by magicloop | Hacker News Reader

One thing I can't figure out (genuine question) is why they don't have 20% time anymore for innovation. I thought it was a key driver for new products at Google. Does such a thing cause career risk, or political strife?

Also, I'd like to understand if their AI lab, Deep Mind, also suffers the same problem, or does it have a different culture? Does Deep Mind have 20% time?

I'd appreciate it if anyone within the company could explain it please.

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I was at Google from late 2013 to early 2016, and even then, I would hear 20% time referred to as 120% time [1]. So 20% time hasn't been a de facto practice for about a decade.

[1]: https://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-not...

That's a great article. To me it makes painful reading because what it means is that some of the most talented engineers are being hired by Google to do just regular enterprise software stuff, but disincentivised to actually do innovation for which they are most able. If they were back in the open market so many great firms could have been founded, which might be the ultimate corporate strategy for Google - to take talent off the market.

It was always a myth. Back in the day, a few people would have 20% projects. Most did not, or did so only once in a while.

I can only speak from my experience, but:

For the decade that I've been at Google it has always been the case that quite a few people around me had 20% projects. This includes myself, my teammates, people reporting to me, people reporting to someone else doing a 20% project on my team and so on.

"Quite a few" is pretty imprecise. Did you ever do a count?

I did, around 2007: 8 or 9 engineers around a table. Maybe 1 or 2 had a 20%.

The corporate environment demands results every quarter, so everyone who cares about career must show measurable progress every 3 months. That's why the corporate crowd looks like a bunch of blind men with walking sticks, looking down precisely 3 feet ahead. They are the type that will walk thru an amazon forest, and their only memories will be mud and potholes on their way.

If I'm understanding it correctly, you are saying doing 20% time on a side project is a career risk as you won't be seen to be "delivering" as much as your peers (because the side project is not valued).

Is it even worse than that - you get rooted out because innovation side projects marks you out as being troublesome (as it does not align with corporate plans/goals)?

Caveat that I don't know what I'm talking about, but maybe 20% time violates the inclusiveness value because it doesn't require/include others' opinions:

> “Respect each other” is translated into “find a way to include and agree with every person’s opinion”. In an inclusive culture (good —it doesn’t withhold information and opportunity) with very distributed ownership (bad), you rapidly get to needing approval from many people before any decision can be made.

The only person whose opinion 20% time, as prescribed, does not value, is your manager's. (As they shouldn't be able to veto it.) Your 20% project is not going to get anything done if you're not taking the opinions of your collaborators/dependencies/customers into account.

IMO, The reason most people don't pursue 20% projects is because it's hard to be the manager, product manager, and main developer on a project that you're giving 1 day a week to. It's really, really hard. Most people don't have the skillset to do that well.

So the path of least resistance to a simple life is to just devote 100% of your time to what your manager wants you to work on, where its her job to manage, product manage/wrangle product managers, etc.

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