Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

It may be, in part, Google's giant cash machine. It makes it possible to be altruistic. In a world of fierce/commoditized competition it is much harder to expend resources on 'side' projects.

Google also thrives in a healthy internet.

View on HN

"They were happy to see employees spontaneously self-organizing to put their 20% time to good use."

Reminded me that I heard that Google's 20% time had generally like 10% participation and has had a number of conditions including manager approval for the last 4 years. Is this article breathing new life into the myth of 20% time or does this reflect the revival of the process?

Either way, incredible accomplishment on the patch army!

20% time has always meant different things depending on who you talk to. It's likely that you're just talking to different people.

I took copious amounts of 20% time in my time at Google (2009-2014). Usually I'd start a 20% project with neither my manager's knowledge nor his approval; if it looked like it had legs, I'd let him know about it and ask what he thought. I never had a manager outright forbid me from working on a 20% project; responses ranged from "You should consider this your main project now; it's critically important that we understand this area" (along with a spot bonus for delivering on it) to "Well, you can work on it, but you are unlikely to get credit for it come promo time." In general, as long as I got my work done, my managers didn't care what else I was working on.

Was your workload such that you could put in a reasonable number of hours on your 'work' and still have 20% of your time for other projects? Or was 20% time just putting in an extra 20% on top of what other developers (who didn't do 20% projects) would do?

Over my career there, yes, I could put a reasonable number of hours on my work and still do 20% projects. There were short periods of time when I was asked to "bank" the time and focus entirely on my main project, eg. I might work straight for 5 weeks on my main project and then take a week straight of 20% time once it launched.

This suited me fine - usually the way I took 20% time was to fit it into time periods when I didn't really have much else to do or I was bored with my main project. And splitting it up like this let me focus more intently on both of them, which helped in delivering.

Cool, sounds like it worked out for you about the way I would expect. I suppose it may depend some on your team, I have heard some people say it is just 20% extra work.

Googler here. I recently had a 20% project that sometimes had bursts of 100% busyness (but still ~20% on average). It also was not relevant to my team and was in the benefit of "everyone". No explicit manager approval was required.

It certainly depends on the particular manager or even org, but in general 20% projects are still a thing for those who want them (not many).

> in general 20% projects are still a thing for those who want them (not many).

Why is that? Any more insight for that?

People enjoy their work in different ways. Some like being 100% on their main project, some like involving themselves in many smaller efforts (both across their main project and across 20%). Also, the default state is to not have a 20% project, the only people that will work 20% on something else are those that made a specific effort to do so.

It's not uncommon for people to put additional effort (that you can spend on a 20%) to fix stuff in the primary project. Like, voluntarily adding themselves to a build cop rotation or doing code / readability reviews as a service, and so on. And sometimes, the primary project is tight on deadlines and people want to stay focused.

And even when a person is enjoying the 20% opportunity, most of the time there is no good project to take on. During my stays at Google, I've done many 20% projects (>10), but only had a 20% project may be a third of the time.

Googler here, 20% projects are very real. It's a flexible tool between employee and manager that gets used in a lot of ways. The only recent guidance was that 20% projects should benefit the company. And, mileage will vary depending on the relationship between employee and manager. Some employees and managers use the program well, others don't do as good of a job, but it's still very alive and well.

IMHO, this is a good example of 20%.

20% time never went away. There's especially a lot of code health 20% projects, and like the article says, this is applying that spirit to open source.

As other Googlers have said (and yes, I'm also one) 20% time is a bit misunderstood and always has been. Suffice it to say that it never died, and different groups have different levels of participation - some times, some teams are focused on a launch so the percentage of time spent goes up or down. But generally speaking, yes, this is exactly the sort of healthy thing that we encourage.

Not sure I follow your first point but the latter one I think hits the nail on the head.

Google benefits greatly from healthy code ecosystem. Any exploit could easily come back and bite them in the ass. As big as they are and as much code as they pump out, they still rely on third party code and less exploits in the wild is a big win for them.

Google is primarily a capitalist corporation and by definition not altruistic. It's accountable to its shareholders; if the CEO couldn't make a case for e.g. how employees spending part of their time on side projects somehow benefits the bottom line, this liberty wouldn't be allowed.

Google employees own >50% of voting rights of the company stock. They aren't subject to external interests in the same way most other public companies are.

On a tangent, why shouldn't we celebrate projects that benefit both private and public interests? IMO, society would be quite a bit better if the two were more often aligned (like you suggest they may be in this case).

And employees want to see the stock grow. Right?

I wasn't implying that it's bad when private and public interests are aligned. What I'm saying is that this is not the same as altruism, and if private and public interests are at odds, the private ones will likely win as they have before at Google. This is just the nature of a capitalist company. Let's not have illusions about that.

While obviously, yes, we are a public company and aligned with shareholder value, you are vastly underestimating the core of the altruism in the Googlers doing this work (and working on Elections, and G4NP and so on)...and who are also a large amount of the shareholders involved.

Google is also a big part of the reason of the poor health of the web.

You're going to have to explain that one a bit. Or perhaps you think Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for popunder ads, and Jon Postel for unsolicited Viagra spam?

Their browser market dominance (which they got in part through shady marketing strategies) is a big part of it.

How do you think we got here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13763759

> Their browser market dominance (which they got in part through shady marketing strategies) is a big part of it.

I have to point out that Microsoft are still the biggest supplier of desktop Web browsers.

Of course, we all know that Tim makes money by selling ads. And Google, on the other hand, has nothing to do with it /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com