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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Something I never understood about Google's 20% time concept...do people at Google not have deadlnes?

Like it's just assumed that every project estimate will be added 20% to account for 20% time?

Like it's great when you're a market gorilla dominating the competition in search, but how does it work when you're #3 in the cloud and trying desperately to compete with Azure and AWS from behind. Do those people get 20% time too? Seems like a recipe for always staying #3...

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Full disclosure: I'm a former Googler.

20% time varies widely across the company, and the ability for an engineer to take their 20% time isn't as sacrosanct as it once was. On many teams it's discretionary depending on current team load (though on the teams I was on, generally granted if only as a matter of maintaining morale). Not everyone has a 20% project all of the time.

People still have deadlines, but the amount of work you commit to doing for a particular deadline is scaled by people's availability - and that includes any 20% work.

It's generally not useful to think about project estimates as padding 20% extra time - because deadlines tend to be exogenous (holiday seasons, launch events, etc.) and less negotiable, and more as scope of work that can be committed to in a particular period, which is something you actually have control over.

I've never worked anywhere that deadlines were set with enough precision that +/- 20% would be distinguishable from noise. I think it would be lost to more significant factors like differences in employee productivity and unexpected roadblocks

Maybe there is a Pareto principle (80/20 rule) effect with these side projects: for these, you get 80% of the benefit (vs. working on it full-time) with only 20% of the hours. And for the main gig, maybe it’s 90% of the benefit for 80% of the hours. So, 1.7 for the price of 1? Sounds like free utils to me.

Plus: positive effects on employee morale/retention, skill and network building, (pseudo?) R+D / asset development, etc.

Disclosure: I’m far too dumb to work at Google. Discount accordingly.

I'm on a similar plan with 10% (not at Google!). It's not really deadline sensitive. The 10% projects tend to be long-term so I can easily move them off my schedule for a while and spend more time on them after.

The whole thing is optional for us anyway and in fact needs to be approved every 3 years.

And I'm not really 100% occupied at work anyway. If I were, how would I fit in learning, networking etc?

> do people at Google not have deadlnes

I've yet to see anyone work 100% of their work time.

So yeah, it's better to codify "procrastination time" as 20% and motivate people to not feel guilty when working on something different.

Google owns the stuff you make during 20% time, iirc, so they use it as a feeder for new products.

Allegedly (I can't verify, but can't see why they'd lie) GMail, Google Maps and AdSense were all born out of people's 20% time and Google just swooped in and turned them into full on products.

It might be worth staying #3 in cloud if they could pull off products like that again. I can't help but notice that those products are all old, though.

From all I can tell, Google Maps was not started from within Google, but started in early 2003 as Where 2 Technologies [1] and was purchased by Google in October 2004 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Eilstrup_Rasmussen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_maps#History

>Google Maps

Google Maps started off as KeyHole, a technology company that was funded by In-Q-Tel aka the VC arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it was acquired by Google.

https://www.iqt.org/news/in-q-tel-announces-strategic-invest...

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

Why? That just means you need ~20% more people - a bit more because people don't scale like that, but Google has to scale regardless so it's not much difference. And this is an org that allegedly creates projects that will never go anywhere just to keep talent in house and busy, so I'd say they certainly can afford 20% overhead.

You also have to consider that not everyone takes advantage of it.

And that furthermore the 20% projects can have value to the company. Wasn't Gmail someone's 20% project?

The 20% time rule might be useful in attracting good developers and keeping them from leaving too soon. So in the end it might be more profitable for the company to pay people to play around.

You're still taking a 20% penalty hit to your productivity. And if you're 3rd in the market and actually care about getting to #1 (Maybe GCP doesn't), that's a massive impediment.

I would imagine that a lot of the 20% projects end up being incorporated in, or part of something profitable. Adsense, for example, was a side project.

From what I understand the rule is that you get to choose what you work on, but it has to align with the company.

So what you end up with is that your most talented/intelligent staff end up working on, and learning about things that they think are interesting and will help the company.

I believe it's form investing into your employees

People will mess with fancy tech, crazy projects and not only learn from it, but also feel less burnout

Also stops the urge for devs to push for fancy tech in production, or at least until it is demo from a ‘learning project’.

Former Googler. I can't recall ever being told when or what to do. Management is more backwards-looking and individually-directed, at least where I was sitting. I had to write about what I did every year, and then people would say whether that was good or not. Organizational goals were objective and coarse, such as cut build times by half by end of year, or whatever.

You can also think of a 20% project as being the last item in your work queue.

When your "real job" is too busy, gets dropped. When you are ahead of schedule, it gets pulled out to keep you from idling.

It doesn't have to be literally 20% of your time every day, week or quarter, although some people structure it that way in practice.

Maybe they are assuming that their engineers can output 25% more than Azure's and AWS'? :)

20% of a 10X engineer is two whole normal engineers!

Even if they're right, that means that they'd only be catching up at 5% faster than them, rather than 25...

I've heard that in the last ten years or so 20% time is on top of the 100% time for normal work. So no, deadlines aren't padded to account for it.

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