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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Does this statement

“dedicated Google “20% time” volunteers”

strike anyone as a bit “army intelligence” like?

Maybe I don’t understand, these are Google employees, right? Why are they volunteers too? Google gives employees a day long sabbatical once a week, thus 20%. Aren’t they paid to work then? What’s so dedicated about their offsets?

Wouldn’t it be better to say something like

“A subset of Google employees chose to use their weekly sabbatical time to retire technical debt for Matrix”?

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By "volunteering" I assume they mean the fact that you can choose what to do with that time, assuming you actually have it, within the context of the company. So it is an actual choice you have as to what to work on, which isn't usually the case with your normal job duties.

Whether those hours end up being unpaid overtime ("120% time") or not varies wildly from time to time and team to team, in my experience there. I had a real 20% project while I was there ~8 years ago (porting modern Linux to a vendor device Google used internally), but I also stayed late quite often too; I can't say I know for sure how it added up in the end.

Sounds like this is a term used to make them happy about working additional paid time on a Google-owned product. I mean, if they spent this volunteer time (even if paid) on a public good, I could appreciate that, but choosing to do paid work on your own company's money-making products is not volunteering, it's just regular work but you choose what to work on during 20% of your time.

> but choosing to do paid work on your own company's money-making products is not volunteering, it's just regular work but you choose what to work on during 20% of your time.

Disclosure: Google employee, opinion my own.

You are right, but that blog post is using volunteer in the weaker (but nonetheless common) meaning of "someone who raises their hand to do something". 20% time, when done properly, is more of an employee wellness and career/skill building perk. It is like your employer giving you paid time to take a class or training that is related to your job.

When you get evaluated during performance reviews, do your 20% time projects count? If not, it seems like you are just doing a side project in your free time but giving any IP that results to Google. If it does count toward perf, then cool, it’s nice to have complete autonomy for that 20% of your workload.

How would they not count? “fshbbdssbbgdd built this incredibly valuable thing, but sadly it was done as a 20% project, so we can’t count it.”?

Performance reviews are how managers provide positive or negative reinforcement for employees who do or don’t further the organization’s goals. Does a really cool 20% time project count toward that if it isn’t related to my work? Does the manager have any incentive to value it (since they get evaluated on progress on the larger team’s goals)?

Every sane boss I’ve had has been happy if I do things that are good for the org, doubly so if they were ideas that I came up with myself for efforts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Is 20% time different from this somehow?

What other companies never seem to understand about "Google's 20% time" is that, allegedly, as I don't work there, it wasn't really 8 hours out of your contracted 40 hours, but more like 16 hours out of the 80 hours you chose to work this week for most Googlers. People working on things in 20% time are volunteers in the sense that they're doing extra work voluntarily, rather than going home. It's not like they're doing this stuff during "work hours."

They had something like this when I worked at Atlassian, which was copied from Google (like most everything there)

You could pick a thing to work on outside your normal job and they’d “give” you time. However you had to basically justify it to your manager. This also hilariously ended up in having to plan OKR style achievements for your spare time project. So it was another, voluntary layer of micromanaging crap added over your real job.

> This also hilariously ended up in having to plan OKR style achievements for your spare time project.

Indeed that's really funny in an absurd way.

No, Googlers I know def don’t work 80 hours…

I've only heard about it from ex-Googlers so perhaps it's different now. 20% time was introduced a long time ago (before Google went public?) and 80 hour weeks were a lot more common back then...

Some Googlers I know barely work 20 hours!

Anyone have tips for finding a chill team at Google? Passed all interview rounds last time but decided to join another company. Might give it another go if I can get one of those <20hr gigs...

Golang team? I've heard the plan is to slack off next 10 years to add pattern matching in Go 3.

Step 1: don't post on HN about how you want to minimise your work-time I guess?

The whole HN is dedicated to minimizing work-times actually.

Hey, I do good work even if I work less time! 40hr workweek is kind of pointless anyways.

The last 20hrs have maybe a 20% return, and I work quickly anyways. I also skip BS meetings.

My managers have always respected me despite me working obviously fewer hours. Quality of work + meeting your goals > some meaningless metric.

Bighetti's team is chill :)

can confirm. We built a potato canon last month.

Not payments.

Haha most Googlers I know work closer to 30 hours a week.

You know some hard working ones then.

Two questions: How long have they been in that position? Have they advanced recently?

Genuinely curious.

Once you get to senior you can coast forever and no one will bother you as long as you're meeting expectations, which gets easier and easier once you know the company culture. Anyone with 5+ years of industry experience or 2+ years at Google can figure out how to coast on 30 hours a week if they want. There's 100,000 employees, no one notices. Ads is a seemingly endless firehose of revenue so the bottom line is never threatened by your laziness.

It’s hard to say for such a large company with people in so many countries, but I doubt all that many Googlers work much more than full time. Many have families.

Hence the way I've heard it referred to as "120% time."

This is salaried work so pay is unchanged. Whether or not you work more than you would otherwise depends on how disciplined you are about it.

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