[ma2rten]

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.

[bachmeier]

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.

[throwaways885]

I don't think things have changed that much, only Google grew so big that 20% projects became a potential damper on your career (the incentives of perf and promo and all that horrible stuff). But the freedom has always technically been there.

[oakfr]

I am a tech lead and find it surprising that 20% projects could damper your career, perf & promo etc. Where I work, a well-executed 20% project is seen as very positive during the perf review. In fact, doing zero 20% projects for a long period of time could actually damper your career.

[OJFord]

But if nothing came of the 20% work, you could've done 25% more on the core job, doing positive performance things there. I'm pretty sure that's what's meant about it being a career dampener, not that it wouldn't be great to hit on something fantastic and accepted as a new core product with thousands working on it full-time. (IANAG.)

[oakfr]

Everything is obvious in the hindsight. 20% projects carry a risk, failing one or more 20% is fine. Failing many is seen as lack of judgment and does dampen your career eventually. My point was that, with reasonable judgment, an engineer can get good stuff done with a 20% project. Also, not every 20% project needs to become a fantastic new core product to be considered a success.

[pushrax]

Sounds very plausible from the outside.

Also implies a widely varying experience with the program; levels of promotion politics must vary across the company, and levels of recognition for anyone's particular project must also vary.

[danans]

> the narrative has shifted over time from "work on whatever you want one day a week"

This was never the narrative, except maybe when the company was a few hundred people. The project has to have a relevance to the company, just not to your primary project. Most 20% has always been chipping in on a team whose problem space interests you and that you might want to transition to. That's definitely what it has been for me.

[wpietri]

And who was later banned at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019003

[nunez]

Wow; good job, dang! mchurch is a poison to the tech community; sucks since he’s such a good writer :(

[kortilla]

Well Marissa Mayer also said 20% realistically didn’t exist at Google, and she’s the one he insulted to get banned.

[fergie]

It was a shame that he overstepped the mark that one time, because he had a lot of sensible and deeply insightful things to say. He is literally one of the best essayists in tech.

[ikiris]

Wow I had no idea that happened. Thanks for posting this for context.

[grenoire]

(I love dang.)

[slumpt_]

Been at Google for several years.

20% time is dead for all intents and purposes in all of the teams I worked (~4 dif teams).

I would not join Google and bank on having it. It’s usually 120% time and done as a way to soft-interview for a team you want to join.

[larsrc]

Clearly you need to find better teams. It's always been an option on the teams I've been on.

[stevage]

>and done as a way to soft-interview for a team you want to join

Clearly it's not that easy.

[slumpt_]

I will say that usually it is easy to move teams, but if the expertise of the team veers strongly from your background (web dev wants to work on C++) they might ask if you want to do 20% first to get a taste. Also can help convince a team to take a more junior hire, e.g.

I’m not sure if it’s ever been an explicit requirement and if you have strong performance reviews it’s usually pretty well-oiled.

Real 20% time though I don’t think I’ve ever encountered.

Maybe if you work on a team without a high-traffic product (internal tooling?).

[slumpt_]

YMMV, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t come in expecting it or you’ll be disappointed. And that’s resonated with other coworkers of mine on other teams, too.

[BobbyJo]

I spent 3.5 years at Google, and, like most things at large companies, 20% is very team dependent. Mchurch may very well have had the experience of being on such a, crappy, team, not that his record is a good indication.

[fredophile]

Marissa Mayer also said it didn't exist [0].

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-google-20-time-does-no...

[mike_hearn]

She was lying to Yahoo employees to make them shut up. There's no nice way to put that. My opinion of Mayer just halved reading that, I had no idea she had been misleading Yahoo staff. What a pity.

I worked at Google for quite a long time and had multiple 20% projects. One of them went into production and now has (I'm told) a team of more than 20 people working on it full time, so the idea they can't go live to users or become real products is totally wrong.

A few things were consistently true when I was there even in 2006:

• Some people would claim 20% time didn't exist or was theoretical

• Other people would be simultaneously taking it and launching new products based on it

News started as a 20% thing. So did GMail, if I recall correctly. Google Sets, if you remember that. There were many, I'm just picking whatever examples spring to mind quickly.

Now, can I believe that at times teams were put under pressure and some managers asked people not to take it? Yeah, absolutely. I spent my time at Google on teams that were doing maintenance and operational time work, first as an SRE and later on a did a tour on the front line fighting spam and hijacking. Those are the sorts of things where there are no product driven "crunch times" (except when there's an attack). So the culture there is maybe more conducive to side projects.

But the idea that it never existed at all is just a lie, sorry. It existed for me across multiple parts of the company and a span of nearly 8 years.

[mondoshawan]

Marissa doesn't exactly represent Google's culture, given she works at Yahoo... :P

[fredophile]

We should ignore the word of one of the company's earliest employees, who worked there for over a decade and became a VP just because she no longer works there?

[mondoshawan]

Yes, because context is key. In that statement she was attempting to craft Yahoo!'s work culture as it's CEO.

In contrast, I've been at Google since 2006 and have been utilizing 20% time since I started, and other Googlers here echo the same experience, and many of our projects are publicly available.

Not sure how her statement jives with the experience and artifacts of other's work other than to say it's not correct, and shaped by the context of the statement.

[helsinkiandrew]

Google employs over 100K people. With that many people there are statistically going to be people with the most amazing and dreadful experiences of working at the place - none of them representative.

[sdoering]

Well. They are representative of a wide variety of different work cultures within Google. And if one were to join it would depend on the team/manager one ends up with what part of the stories told would be representative to you.

As always in big corporations there is no one culture, but an amalgamation of many different subcultures. They can have a shared core, but even that becomes more unlikely the more a company grows. At least in my experience.

[muro]

She doesn't work at Yahoo for more than 3 years now.

[mondoshawan]

I haven't followed her career, TBH, but at the time she made the statement, she was working for Yahoo, so where she's at currently is irrelevant.

Just because she's highly visible, doesn't mean her views are correct.

[toby]

It was amazing how some people lapped up everything he wrote about Google (case in point: apparently a lot of people don't believe 20% time exists at all any more), I guess because he was so prolific (it was hard for actual Googlers to keep up rebut everything), and he was playing into some confirmation bias.

[SquareWheel]

The confirmation bias still exists today, too. On HN I frequently see users claim that Google sells user data, but that isn't true; user data is only used for ad personalization.

I also frequently see the claim that "Don't be evil" has been removed from Google's code of conduct, but it's still clearly visible in the document.

I hope we develop better tools to combat misinformation in the next few years, because social media is far too effective at propagating it. For every person that verifies and corrects a claim, there's ten others who will gladly repeat it. This is especially problematic when there's a bias to exploit, be it political or otherwise.

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

[kortilla]

> Google sells user data, but that isn't true; user data is only used for ad personalization.

That is selling user data. It’s just got a layer of bullshit in between.

As long as Google offers ways to target ads at specific demographics, they are selling that demographic indicator about you whenever you click on one of those ads.

[SquareWheel]

If your data isn't being sold, then no, they're not selling user data. That's changing the meaning of language to make it sound worse than it really is.

You might argue that this data is being leaked, but that isn't clear either. Ads work on an auction system, and there's no guarantee that a user clicking an ad meets a demographic. You'd need to make a case that user data can be accurately built from buying ads alone.

Even if you could prove that, that's _still_ different than the claim that Google is selling user data directly.

[kortilla]

> If your data isn't being sold, then no, they're not selling user data.

That’s just phrasing to attempt to weasel out of the fact that it’s selling the ability to derive the user data. It’s effectively the same thing with a layer of indirection.

> Ads work on an auction system, and there's no guarantee that a user clicking an ad meets a demographic.

Auction system is irrelevant. Unless Google is ignoring your target demographic and keywords entirely, they are selling you a stream of traffic that matches that demographic on average.

[mike_hearn]

That's not a social media problem. The claim that Google sells user data came from the traditional news Big Media outlets like the NYT and WSJ. I remember when it started actually: it happened around the time Google News launched. The narrative in the media industry became very quickly "Google is making tons of money whilst we're going through huge layoffs" and the media spin went from highly positive to very negative at dizzying speed.

A major inflection point was when Rupert Murdoch gave a speech proclaiming the iPad was the future of news and Google was some sort of parasite sucking the blood of journalists. The tone of the output from his newspapers changed overnight and they immediately started digging around for largely fake 'scandals'. The rest of the news industry didn't need much persuading and the rest is history.

Claims you see on social media since then are largely just repeating the media's talking points. It's not like it originated there.

[bawolff]

> Google sells user data, but that isn't true; user data is only used for ad personalization.

I mean, i guess that's a lot better in principle, but it still seems like basically the same thing with an extra layer of indirection. It certainly doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings about google.

[kopakabana]

> Google sells user data, but that isn't true; user data is only used for ad personalization.

And other companies getting referrals can’t connect the dots when they know the user clicking on the AdWords Ad and what the Ad was for?

Companies that work with big data companies run AdWords campaigns in Google for other companies, right?

Even if Google isn’t evil and does everything in the interest of privacy, if their ads, based on your preferences from your emails and browsing history, are used to direct you to some product, there is a way that other companies will learn of those preferences, store them, sell them, and use them.

[jayd16]

How is that a Google problem and not simply the other company tracking their own customers?

[visarga]

Google is targeting the ads, with each targeted ad they leak personal information about the users. Advertisers only have to pay and Google tells them who's matching whatever demographic they want. On the other hand print and billboard ads don't reveal personal information to the advertisers.

[HideousKojima]

IIRC the confusion over "Don't Be Evil" started due to changes by Google's parent company Alphabet when they restructured.

[SquareWheel]

I think so too. Alphabet does have their own Code of Conduct, but it is an additional document. It didn't replace the original.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/code-of-conduct/

[P_I_Staker]

Also (and keep in mind I'm just repeating the rumor) wasn't it supposedly replaced with the slogan "do the right thing"? It was something else fairly harmless.

[SquareWheel]

Not quite. That's the slogan used by Google's parent company, Alphabet. It never replaced Google's slogan which remains the same today.

[shadowgovt]

TBF, it's not just mchurch. Whether or not managers know how to make space for it varies heavily from department to department.

[accountLost]

Should be 125% though (or is it already obvious for everyone and just me being pedant ?)

[traviscj]

I’d never heard of 120% until this thread, but I immediately interpreted it to mean “you’re free to do your self directed 20% work on nights/weekends/your “own time”.”

It actually took me a second to see yours, but I guess you mean more of a “ya you can do whatever you want on fridays as long as you get 100% of work done by Thursday” vibe?

[saberdancer]

Yeah, you'd need to work 125% as effective for 4 days to make up one day you work on other stuff.

[CodesInChaos]

If you use 5 days a week as base and add 1 day for personal work, you're at 120%.

Of course interpreting it as "you need to work 125% for the 4 remaining days" is equally valid.

[haakonhr]

Or the 16.6666667% policy