| 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. |