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Comment by Jabbles | Hacker News Reader

Google's popular 20% time, which allowed many engineers to work on their own ideas one day a week, has been severely curtailed.

What's happened to it?

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According to the media, Google essentially shut down 20% time years ago, and forced all employees to work only on official company-approved product teams.

This usually comes as a surprise to all the people who are actively working on 20% projects.

My understanding from various folks who work at Google is that 20% time is not something that you just "get", you have to fight for it generally, you have to have real projects to work on, etc.

Only in the sense that to do anything self-directed, you have to fight for it. It wouldn't be self-directed otherwise.

Basically, that means that your manager is not going to nag you to take 20% time, and it's your responsibility to come up with a 20% project that's both tractable and useful to Google, and you're still responsible for pulling your own weight on your 80% project. If you can balance those concerns, nobody's going to stop you from working on a 20% project (and there're escalation paths if they do). It's just that many Googlers are not accustomed to situations where they can work on something of their own initiative but nobody's asking them to work on something of their own initiative.

Yes. It's not just goof off time that you can spend willy nilly until you figure out a productive project. I imagine that the problem isn't just lack of self-direction it's work saturation. If you set your coworkers expectations based on your level of effort sans 20% time and you set your work-load the same then even if you come up with a good idea it might be difficult to carve out enough cycles to work on it without letting obligations drop on the floor in the short-term. And then that situations persists indefinitely.

Nothing, 20% time is still alive and well.

I guess it's team or role dependent. When I interviewed with Google the first time I was directly told that there would be no 20% time (my memory is hazy but I was interviewing for something related to AdWords Fraud at the time). And this was back in 2005, when the media was actually glowing about Google's 20% time policy. The interviewer joked, "Sure you get 20%. On Sunday you can do whatever you want."

So I suspect that if people are picking up on the "curtailed 20%", it's because Google employees are telling people that it is during the actual interview process.

I guess some manager realized that they could improve productivity by up to 20% if the engineers focused on the official company projects.

25%

I think he implies that the manager is stupid

No, I do not. I imply that the manager does not understand the benefits of 20% time on productivity.

oh my gosh...

Let me spoil the joke:

Going from 80% to 100% is a 25% increase.

There is no joke because I was not including all of the time spent on 20% time as a gain in productivity. Read where I wrote that they could see an increase in productivity of up to 20%. I'm not quoting exact numbers because drumroll managers hardly ever think of hard numbers. Its all (gu)es(s)timates.

sounds like an excuuuuuse ;)

20% is one day a week, assuming a 5-day work week. That's not bad.

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