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Comment by ibmthrowaway218 | Hacker News Reader

I thought 20% time at Google was all but gone?

I came here to ask the same thing - my understanding was that Innovation at Google had shifted from "Internal Curiosity - 20% Time" to "Inspire via Moonshots - Acquire what we need to get there".

But that's my external perspective.

I just started a few months ago. 20% time is still alive, and easy to take.

Thanks eru! I wonder if there's a difference between Sydney and Mountain View?

I'd heard otherwise, but am glad to be corrected - it's a model many other businesses (NB: Not all) could utilise.

Sydney is way more laid back than Mountain View. We also have better offices; not as open-plan-y here, and not crowded like in Mountain View.

You just started a few months ago; how would you really know?

(Perhaps 20% of your time is alive and easy to take; on the other hand, engineers who've been working on the same fast paced project for years and have built large bodies of domain knowledge often don't see it the same way. Not a single engineer I work with does 20% time, to my knowledge.)

I just realized, there might be a cultural divide between Google Sydney and Google Mountain View. We are more laid back here.

And, as everywhere in any company, you can do whatever you can get away with. From a pure career point of view, you can make a choice here: put in the 20% time for another project of your choice, to keep your skills sharp, have some fun and get some additional visibility.

Or put the extra 20% time into your main project for some marginal improvements. I can see that social pressure (real or perceived) in lots of teams might be towards the latter. For a 20% project you have to find your own group of peers to get recognition for it.

Not to be nosy, but do you take it? Do people you know?

Yes, and yes. I'm learning about machine learning, and will apply it to have an experimental stab at an interesting internal problem that will probably not pan out at all; but I will have learned something.

I've never been a googler but I think that makes sense. In the early days google could deploy an MVP and people would try it out even if it wasn't "done" , now the level of polish expected from a google product is much higher than could probably be produced by a 20% project.

I don't know whether 20% projects are supposed to launch publicly. Officially Google launches are serious business.

But, you can start a 20% project, impress people with your prototype, and get a real team started on that.

From previous responses to this question, it depends entirely on your manager. Some make it easy, some mess up prioritization so badly you can't get regular work done to allow for 20% time.

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